What the hell does asbestos have to do with Wordpress? |
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The question in the title is rhetorical. The answer? Wordpress, blogging software that this blog is currently using, has absolutely nothing to do with asbestos.
This could prove to be a very ugly bump in the road for Wordpress. What am I talking about? This comes via Andy Baio from Waxy.org:
I discovered last week that since early February, [Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress has] been quietly hosting almost 120,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. Why Wordpress? The Wordpress homepage has a very high Google Pagerank of 8, largely because every Wordpress-powered blog links to the Wordpress homepage by default.
Mr. Baio then asks two important questions:
Do organizers of open-source projects need to disclose how they’re making money off the project?
Yes, I think they do. The fact that Wordpress is a blog program, not an article repository is bound to confuse at least some people (see screenshot above). They could start another site called: wordpressarticles.com or something. Also, it’s wordpress.org not wordpress.com. Isn’t .org supposed to be for non-profit organizations? Yes, I do realize that there are lots of profit-generating commercial sites using .org extensions. I have no idea if Matt Mullenweg is making a penny after expenses from Wordpress but I’m guessing Wordpress is definitely not setup as a registered non-profit.
Second, is it ethical for open-source projects to make money gaming search engines?
It’s unethical for anybody on any website to break the rules of another website. Google specifically has guidelnies (might be a stretch on my part calling them “rules”) against this kind of behavior and Matt might be young and perhaps still a bit naive, but that’s not an excuse. In short, he should know better. I don’t know the guy personally but I am impressed that, along with others, he’s generated 100,000 Wordpress downloads and I’ve used his software, with varying results, on a number of blogs without paying a dime, which means that I certainly don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. I suggested to one of our hosting companies to use Wordpress for both their official blog and their customers, so I have helped the cause in a roundabout way.
But.
None of this excuses a really bad business decision. I believe Matt will do the right thing here and move these articles to a more appropriate location and hopefully post haste. In fact, here’s what Mullenweg told Mr. Baio specifically about the situation:
… 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.”
My vote as a user is all for moving this totally unrelated articles program to another more appropriate domain or ending the program altogether. At the very least, put up some disclosure or make it be at a third level domain. I’m not adverse to the concept of Mr. Mullenweg and the Wordpress team making money, but they do need to spell these things out very clearly how they are making money.
And if the Wordpress future is going to be a non-charitable, profitable enterprise, then get a dot.com going. Please.
Update 3/31: Google has already removed the offending articles from its index and stripped Wordpress.org from PR8 to PR0 over the engineered, cloaked pages.
Update 4/1/05: From his vacation in Italy Mullenweg responds with a lengthy apology, accepting full responsibility for the colossal advertising blunder. His choice of calling the response to this “noise” is a bit unsettling. Might have been better to call it: “responding to my mistake” but the piece itself was written eloquently and seems genuine anyway.
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What have we learned from this? Negative divs are pretty freakin stupid - cloak your links if you’re serious ;)…
Trackback by Oilman — March 30, 2005 @ 6:38 pm PST
“It’s unethical for anybody on any website to break the rules of another website” Say what!?
That’s insane! So if I have a rule on my website that says if you ever mention my name you have to pay me $100, will you follow it? Google does not rule the web, but if they want to, they can certainly choose not to index wordpress.org or any other site. They do it all the time anyway.
(Actually, you’ll notice the page at Google is about “guidelines” not rules, and they are just suggestions to webmasters if you want your site indexed by Google.)
Comment by Pete Prodoehl — March 30, 2005 @ 7:04 pm PST
Pete - thank you for taking time to comment and disagree with my position. I guess maybe you didn’t read what I said very carefully. I clearly said in the piece above that they were guidelines and therefore you essentially echoed in parenthesis what was there all along. And your example is not only flawed, but totally absurd and nothing along the lines of what I was saying. That would be insane if that’s what I meant to infer.
If you are taking Google’s free traffic or submitting your site to them then yes, you absolutely should do whatever you can to abide by their rules, guidelines, or whatever they call them. I think the word “unethical” is strong for a violating something minor that you don’t understand, I’m clearly not talking abou that. Matt’s taking money for what he’s doing and he’s pretty proud of his PR8, so you know there were no accidents here. I would label that type of activity unethical.
If you submit a comment to my blog then you comply with my guidelines or guess what, buddy? See ya! That’s what I’m talking about. I’m not going to follow anything you put on your website pertaining to me unless I’m at your website and trying to interact with it in some way. Don’t you see the difference?
If a webmaster doesn’t want to follow Google’s guidelines they have an obvious choice: put up a robots.txt file and block Google’s spiders. I bet I know the answer to what you’ll do about that — nothing — because 75% of the traffic to your website is coming from Google, most likely.
There are people out there who spend all too much of their time trying to over-optimize their sites so that they get #1 listings in some search engine only to find that some of the advice they had been receiving was bad and they end up going backwards. If that same effort was put into the content of their website, imagine how much better their sites would perform (in user satisfaction, usability and marketing)?
Comment by TDavid — March 30, 2005 @ 10:15 pm PST
[…] brevity, I admit I’m sloppy. So, in total fairness, one should take my quote above in complete context (again, something that bloggers are notoriously sloppy about doing). I can pull a […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Blogger guilty sin #1: ruh-ro, quotes without being in proper context — March 30, 2005 @ 11:44 pm PST
WordPress and ’spam’
I get WordPress for free. It’s a rocking program. Easy to use, super customizable - I’ve been nothing but pleased. Therefore, ff Matt Mullenweg wants to earn a little money for his development efforts at the expense of a weakness in Google’s Page…
Trackback by Greg Yardley's Internet Blog — March 31, 2005 @ 12:58 am PST
TDavid, Hmmm, either I was way too tired or I somehow missed the part in parentheses, but re-reading the post makes more sense now. I don’t completely disagree with everything you said, I just thought the part about breaking the rules of other sites was a little nuts (and it seems you agree.)
Yes, I get a ton of traffic from Google, but I suppose I didn’t factor in the AdSense part of as much because I’ve never used Google Ads on any sites I’ve maintained I don’t feel like I have a two-way relationship with Google, which a site running Google Ads obviously should. I get traffic from MSN as well, though I’ve never sibmitted my site from MSN, or looked at any guidelines they suggest. I don’t block them with robots.txt, but then again, I don’t feel I should have to spcifically do that. With MSN, I don’t feel like I have any relationship either, sure I get a bit of traffic from them, but I won’t go out of my way to get more. I suppose I just get sick of the notion that Google is this all-powerful entity, and if you do anything wrong in relation to Google, you’ll be cast out.
As far as the .org versus .com, I completely agree, and yes, ultimately I’d like to see the /articles stuff on wordpress.org disappear, and I think/hope Matt will do the right thing in this case. I suppose I’m just willing to allows people to make mistakes, as long as they learn from them and correct them.
Comment by Pete Prodoehl — March 31, 2005 @ 7:12 am PST
Wordpress and search spam
WordPress has been caught by spamming search engines by Andy Baio. They created about 120,000 small webpages stuffed by high payed keywords like “cialis”, “credit” and so on, and put invisible links on main page of wordpress.org…
Trackback by SEO Blog — March 31, 2005 @ 9:37 am PST
[…] Wordpress, the organization that creates the blogging software used by this site just got bitch-slapped by Google for some really sneaky ways of scamming the Google AdWords system. I don̵ […]
Pingback by Chausse.org — March 31, 2005 @ 2:20 pm PST
[…]
While this situation bears some similarities to the recent Wordpress troubles (see: What the hell does asbestos have to do with Wordpress?), it should be noted that the Syndic8 crew were […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Syndic8 on the hot seat for gaming search engines — May 12, 2005 @ 1:35 pm PST
[…] tch english chinese [23:18:43] [TDavid-LIVE] what the hell does asbestos have to do with wordpress: http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20050330/1642/ [23:19:34] [orangecrush] half assed aplolgy [23:20:24] [CatsEye] Friday the 13th [23:22:25] [CatsEye] If I […]
Pingback by Script School News » Show #238 IRC Log — May 17, 2005 @ 11:29 am PST
[…] Phil Ringnalda noticed something odd with some advertisements running on various O’reilly sites and blogged about it. It reminded Phil of the Wordpress search enging gaming debacle but this more reminds me — and a few of Phil’s commenters — of the syndic8 advertiser playing the PR game mess. I interviewed Jeff Barr about the Syndic8 ad situation in great detail for those who want to delve deeper into why sites are seduced into advertising deals that they might not fully understand or agree with. It happens to smaller sites and bigger sites and really all types of sites. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » O’reilly’s should hire an Ad Compliance Officer — August 24, 2005 @ 11:53 am PST
[…] Being wordpress.com is in beta status, it’s quite possible this is all an honest mistake, as Matt claimed when they were caught with the -9000 hidden pixel trick, it certainly is another really bad choice of redirection, especially with a blogger as prominent as Scoble. And trust me, it is a choice .. somebody setup the server to redirect errors to the home page. That didn’t happen accidentally. If that somebody was Scoble, then he might want to let his readers know this is the default behavior for error messages, but I doubt seriously he did it or even knows that this is happening. No, I didn’t ask him but now that it’s on Channel 9, I’m sure he will quickly become aware of the situation. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Readers noticing wordpress.com redirecting some Scoble traffic to their homepage — October 30, 2005 @ 1:02 pm PST
[…] Why aren’t there better whitelisting features in Akismet, Matt Mullenweg? Or, if there are, how should people like darkmoon go about employing them? Sure hope you aren’t harboring any grudges over the negative comments I made about your -9000 pixel Wordpress tricks, Matt. […]
Pingback by Akismet et al erroneously flagging trackbacks from Hmm as SPAM, not HAM » Make You Go Hmm — December 7, 2006 @ 6:40 pm PST