Before anybody gets too excited about this one. The wordpress.com service is still in beta, invite-only status and it’s possible that they plan to setup custom error pages before they launch to the general public. They are not doing 404 redirects, but some Scoble readers are noticing and commenting on unexplained redirects.

Here’s another thing I dislike about using third party blog hosting, even paid hosting sometimes if you don’t monitor their activity closely. They take liberties with webmaster/blogger’s traffic. Recently I signed up with a well known, heavily advertised host which for this post will remain nameless but I’ll be talking about in a separate post. When I signed up for one of their popular shared hosting plans I added three domains. One of the first things I noticed was their automated signup program put up a default advertising page on all the domains for themselves. They have an affiliate program, but none of those links were affiliate links for the customer (me). So basically, I paid them for hosting, they setup a placeholder advertising page for themselves that would stay there until it was replaced by content, and then anybody who might have signed up through those pages I received zero credit.

Bullshit.

Now take Robert Scoble who recently switched his primary blog to the upcoming wordpress.com commercial blog hosting service. Instead of being able to have his own domain, he went to (was forced to?) a subdomain (scoblelizer.wordpress.com) and I’ve noticed a couple times when I navigated there being redirected to Wordpress.com. A little while later the site was going to Scoble’s blog again. No error message or explanation, just a redirect. I was going to drop Scoble an email about the situation and alert him that his traffic was being redirected, probably without his knowledge, but I didn’t get to it.

Turns out that I wasn’t the only one who has noticed this, via the Channel 9 forums:

I was having problems recently when I tried to access his blog. It was just redirecting me to wordpress.com.

If this is how it will work once wordpress.com launches to the general public, then let me call BS on it now. A redirect to the wordpress.com homepage sending off Scoble’s readers without giving any other explanation will be yet another black eye for Wordpress. Don’t do it, folks!

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.

Unfortunately, this is a common 3rd party hosting trick: hey, here’s an idea, we redirect certain server/script error conditions and when there are server/script problems instead of throwing a customer default error page, send everybody to the home page (free advertising!).

Unless the customer agrees to this activity in advance this is WRONG. Bad. I don’t care if it’s “free hosting” if it happens without the customer/blogger’s knowledge it’s deceptive and wrong. The host is taking advantage of the webmaster/blogger’s traffic.

Scoble, I’ll make the plea to you again: get your own domain and stop hosting off other people. You can setup Wordpress on your own domain and not be part of stuff like this. My offer to help you get YOUR OWN hosting from somebody reputable is still available. Probably won’t cost you a dime either. I’d be happy to help you. For nothing. No strings attached.

(Note: I offered to help Scoble find hosting once before and though he called me back, he decided to go with another option.)

At the very least please consider telling wordpress.com to simply display an error message on your page rather than redirect your readers to their homepage for any reason. Some of your readers might think you are deceptively pimping wordpress. Maybe that’s ok with you, I don’t know, but your readers might want to be informed, if that’s the case.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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