Telagon Sichelputzer

Wordpress as Google Spammer

While reading the Mex Blog and Der Schockwellenreiter I strumbled upon an interesting tidbit concerning “Wordpress”. This open-source project is common knowledge for all blog hosters and users, especially for the users if they start their own independent blog on their private server. But what most of them don’t know is simple: Each “powered by Wordpress” found within the blogs increases the PageRank for the official Wordpress website at Google and any other search engine. Here’s an excerpt from the original article at Waxy.org:

The Problem. Wordpress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting at least 120,000 168,000 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. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here’s a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Or try this search tool, which searches multiple Google datacenters.)

Furthermore, the author questions the idea of how to use and recieve earnings for the open-source projects / foundations. This is some quite interesting issue since “everybody” or “the community” is contributing their own input to the developers and registrars of these foundations to create these software programs.