WordPress.org engaged in some weird gaming of search engines
2 Apr 2005: Matt has posted a very nice response to the concerns and taken all the weird stuff down. That still leaves him/them with the questions of how to pay the bills, but it seems clear that future steps will be more community involved, which is a good thing.
As reported on Waxy.org (with some corrections by jluster), WordPress.org has been doing this weird deal with Hot Nacho where they’re hosting a nearly 200K “hidden” articles whose sole purpose is to pull in search engines and generate advertising revenue for other folks. WordPress.org (clearly a most worthy cause) gets a cut, which helps defray web site and development costs.
Now I’m all for supporting WordPress. I think it’s a great tool, and we’re using it for our family blogs and for a community group working to support our schools. I’d gladly contribute to a pot that helps keep these folks cranking this thing out. I’ve made sure that it’s quite clear that we’re using WordPress and that the links to WordPress.org are front and center. If having those links to WordPress.org help keep the project alive, then they can count on us.
But gaming search engines is frankly pretty icky, and I’m not so keen. I’d much rather put a ten spot in the hat as it goes by than indirectly support deliberate attempts at manipulating the perceived value of web sites. (I realize that this will happen regardless, but I don’t have to be an active part of it.) I would also much rather have something like Google AdSense ads on WordPress.org which our links would help (in a very small way) increase in value than be part of this strange backdoor game. If WordPress.org has value, and that value can be used to help fund a worthwhile project in a way that the involved parties can agree on, let’s be explicit and up front about it.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Currently listenting to: “Long black veil” from Charming Hostess’s truly spiffy album Punch. This is a quite splendid new release from ReR and is probably my favoritestest album at the moment. Even Sub-Evil Boy likes it!
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