Quod Licet Iovi

WordPress.COM Spams Search Engines …Why Not?

This is not exactly news already. But till this very moment I was repeatedly saying that I’ve never been able to see ads on the notorious Global Tags™ pages for myself. Now it’s changed, I do stand corrected in this post because That Girl was always right on money from the very beginning, Again, and again.

So, yeah:

Sorry, we don’t have any posts here with that tag

…but we’ve got plenty of Hot Nachos ads for you to click through instead:

click to see full sized image

On this splogshot you can see a typical WordPress.com Global Tag page linked from so called Mature .com blogs for many times*. Such “Not Found” pages contains ads only; they does not even link back to the originating blogs. But the funniest thing is that those pages said not even 404s (“Not found”), they’re full blown 200 (“OK”) and thereby indexed by the search engines.

That is why, in this moment, we can also see the following picture of the Google’s index**:

this image linked to Google search; see for yourself

Please notice the links right above and below the link in question: Adam was the first who noticed this horrific user experience. Also of note: this blank (well, except the AdSense and partner’s affiliated links) Automattic’s global tags page even outranked those Technorati’s ones, which do contain some bits of the actual content (linkbacks at the very least)!

I objected and reported this usability issue on multiple occasions both privately and publicly. It only resulted in closing forums threads where it happened. Finally, along with several other volunteers, Automattic banned me from the fora at all. That said, I got absolutely no doubts that Automattic is perfectly aware about producing links intended to manipulate Google’s PageRank algorithm. (Of course you are if such a link scheme is actually a cornerstone your company’s business model built upon.)

Since obviously such pages are “made entirely for the search engines, not for users” and “published specifically for the purpose of showing ads”, this is nothing but a direct violation of basic principles of Google’s “Webmaster Quality Guidelines“, as well as of their own “AdSense Program Policies”.

So, this is an intentional behavior intended to increase revenues via spamdexing (SEO gaming) the search engines (Yahoo, MS Live Search). I only wander why nobody from the legion of the SEO experts notice this? Are they also so deep down in the SE’s back pocket?

The only exception to this rule makes Andy Beard, who for the several times questioned Automattic’s spamdexing peculiar linking practice since the very inception of this link farm on WordPress.com.

—
well, yes, I know it’s actually another Matt and the Google Webspam Team who needs to be asked in the first place. but anyway, would the oncoming interview with Matt M On WordPress Weekly be a proper place to politely ask about all this mess?

ETA: I guess not exactly.

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*) for the non-wordpress.com’ers: GT links are compulsory for all .com users. The price of opt-out and the only way to get out of this link farm is getting off the search engines altogether by marking their blog as Private.

**) yes, a ’phrase operator’, i.e. quotes, was used here for a clearness. but it does not matter too much — even without it said link still is ranked high enough to be on the first page.

<END OF THE ACTUAL POST>

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Feeling Lucky?

in the locked forums thread on “bloated global tags pages PR in action” Kissing Bandit suggested to prevent Global Tags pages from indexing by the search engines because ‘Google doesn’t like to index and display “search results” pages in their own search results (it’s redundant)’, further he also notes:

Many have speculated that it’s part of the reason why you can no longer find Technorati tag pages being returned in Google searches.

WordPress.com may be heading down a similar road if they step out of Google’s good graces, even by an inch.

and indeed that’s exactly how Google handles even local tags (aka ‘Labels’) on blogs hosted on their own service Blogger.com — they don’t index them!

albeit Google has direct vested interests to do just an opposite thing, because they’ve quite recently added to Blogger an inline AdSense integration, which now allows blogspot.com bloggers place ads inline with their blogs’ actual content.

this would benefit not only blogspot.com users to improve monetization of their blogs, but it’d also definitely benefit Google itself by increasing clickthroughs on their own AdSense.

but they don’t do it, just take look at the Blogger.com’s robots.txt:

User-agent: * Disallow: /search

by closing this forums thread, mentioned above, Matt, incidentally, ‘politely’ asked me to “save the paranoid conspiracy theories for my blog”. so, here we go.

[first of all a sidenote: lip service and obscurity are both an excellent soil for rising theories exactly of such kind.]

another forums thread suddenly reveals that Automattic currently does not allow WordPress.com users to change their category slug. so far the latest official response from a staff member is just following:

I’m talking with the other folks at Automattic to find out more of the history with category slugs being turned off.

apparently history of this mysterious forbiddance is so dark, that none from the staff still could not give just a single reasonable answer to any the questions posed in this thread more than once. as usually.

now, my dear readers, do you have any ideas (besides “paranoid conspiracy theories”, of course) why wordpress.com users are not allowed to change their (their, really?) category slugs?

and, finally, just a little fun promised by the title. are you feeling lucky today? then let’s go ahead:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:wordpress.com+link-farm&btnI=I’m+Feeling+Lucky

tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

ETA: that was really quick: finally, after wank posted in that thread, it has immediately* been closed with the following remark:

barry Key Master October 19th, 2007 at 6:23 pm

Renaming the category should also change the slug. If it doesn’t, then its a bug and something that we will fix.

the only problem now is, how any wordpress.com user would know ‘its a bug and something that we will fix’, if that “Topic Closed. This topic has been closed to new replies.”, huh?

the matter is, due to infinite wisdom of the bbPress** developers, ‘Topic Closed’ actually means it’s also well hidden out of the public view, so that nobody could see it anymore. bbPress has also a couple of another wonderful features.

Update:

since over just a single day, after ticket has been submitted into WPMU trac (see my comment below), Donncha has fixed this issue: now renaming the category also changes its slug (URI).

along with the ticket I suggested a patch, which exposes ‘Slug name:’ input field for editing (and thus fixes that bug). unfortunately, this patch hasn’t been accepted.

apparently, WPMU (wordpress.com) developers consider users of the so called ‘multy-user’ version of their software as second-class citizens, relatively to the standalone, single-blog one.

MU users still are not (and, surely, never will be) allowed to change their category slug regardless of its name (to have a short, nice category URIs for example), nor they aren’t allowed to have readable multy-word blognames — hyphens are also banned due to totally unreasonable dev’s arbitrariness (for it could be nothing more).

*) Barry closed the thread just over 4 minutes since Wank’s post, while the thread has been started 8 days ago, was intermittently bumped, and obviously had been seen during a whole week by the staff members.

**) another PHP script used for wordpress support forums