This is just daft. Matt from Wordpress has been outed as someone who is commonly referred to as a Search Engine Spammer.

Why? Because he’s been using hidden div’s on Wordpress.org for advertising.

RustyBrick’s mentioned it at SearchEngineRoundtable, as has Nick at Threadwatch.

Best couple of comments I’ve seen are from rcjordan and Danny Sullivan respectively.

Sensible, from a “I’m going to make money off the web” perspective, but I do think it’s a betrayal of his authority.

I also enjoyed this comment:

“Hot Nacho is a company that supports open-source software, specifically WordPress. All the web geeks need to rememeber that there are worse companies out there than those that try to ’screw with Google’ for PageRank, etc.”

Got it. Just donate money or support some open source project, then your spam won’t be as bad as other types of spam. Really,I can see it now. Spamming for charity. Hey, will this tactic get me banned on Google? Nah, you see, for every dollar we earn by spamming Google to make money off of Google AdSense, we donate 10 cents to a charity. That’s all logged in the universal don’t ban me Google because I’m not as bad as those evil spammers who don’t donate to charity database.

Wordpress is a great tool, I really like it, but that’s just plain daft.

I’m tempted to put it down to a brain fart on Matt’s part, but the people defending it on the basis that it’s WordPress and OpenSource etc… so therefore it’s ok? Sorry, they are just plain stupid.

You cannot spout off about the annoyances of spam, and then defend this, that’s just completely hypocritical.

From the Waxy post

Matt said he was skeptical at first, but the money is helping to cover his costs and hire their first employee. “The /articles thing isn’t something I want to do long term,” he said, “but if it can help bootstrap something nice for the community, I’m willing to let it run for a little while.”

He added that if the user community didn’t like it, he’d end the program. “Everything we do is user driven. If it turns a lot of people off I definitely don’t want it. At the same time, if you think people don’t care it provides some flexibility in setting up the foundation.”

I have to say Matt, using hidden div’s to generate money is something that turns me off. Google’s removing it from it’s system, and you’ve broken the rules of AdSense at the same time. I now wonder if I should remove the links back to WordPress.org so as not to been seen as linking to a bad neighbourhood.

Or add the nofollow attribute that WordPress has so openly supported. Afterall, you’re a proven spammer now. You’re abusing my sites link to yours. The exact kind of thing nofollow is meant for?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2005 at 9:40 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.