Search Engine Cloaking and Optimization Forum

wordpress where can one get it ...

READ THIS : I'm hesitant to even write about this, knowing the web's fondness for angry mob justice, but I feel like it's an important issue that needs to be addressed. My one request: please be calm and rational. Wordpress is a great project, and Matt is a good guy. Think before piling on the hatemail and flames.

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. Here's an example of some results in MSN.)

Why Wordpress? The Wordpress homepage has a very high Google Pagerank of 8/10, largely because every Wordpress-powered blog links to the Wordpress homepage by default. The high pagerank affects their ranking in Google search results, making context-sensitive Google ads very profitable. This, in turn, makes Wordpress very attractive to advertisers.

I stumbled on this issue from a support topic, which was immediately closed without response by an unknown moderator. (After I pointed it out, Matt reopened the thread to add a final comment.)

So, last week, I instant-messaged Matt to ask him some of these questions. He was very helpful, giving me the full story.

The articles are given to him by Hot Nacho, a startup that pays freelance writers to generate 300-800 word articles about specific topics. All advertising revenues go directly to Hot Nacho, and he's paid a flat fee for hosting the articles and ad banners.

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."

Questions. This poses some interesting questions. First, do organizers of open-source projects need to disclose how they're making money off the project? Matt isn't disclosing anything about this activity to the community. I don't think anyone would be upset about Matt trying to support Wordpress with outside sources of revenue, but as an open-source project, they should be held to a higher level of transparency. Without the users and developers all working for free, it wouldn't exist.

Second, is it ethical for open-source projects to make money gaming search engines? Unlike a blog about asbestos news, the Wordpress website has nothing to do with asbestos. It capitalizes off the goodwill of the Wordpress community, which links to the Wordpress website because they support the project -- not because they support search engine spam. But as long as there was transparency about their plans, I think this is less of an issue.

Solutions. Personally, I think there should be a very clear disclosure of their revenue sources on the website, as well as clearly disclosing their commercial plans. Am I donating money to a company? What is the money from advertising being used for?

I want to know what everyone thinks about this. I'm only a Wordpress fan, not a user or developer, so really it's up to the Wordpress community to decide.

Update: In a case of terrible timing, I just found out Matt is on vacation in Italy, so will likely be unable to respond. For what it's worth, I mentioned to him in our chat on Thursday that I was going to write an entry, so he could have taken preemptive action if he wanted to. However, had I know he was leaving the country, I would have waited to post this.

Andre Torrez was the first to note that links to the articles are hidden on the Wordpress homepage using negative positioning with CSS. Here's an explanation of the technique that was used.

Dave found this Hot Nacho advertisement looking for freelance copy writers, offering $3 per article.

Update: Jonas Luster, the first employee of the Wordpress Foundation, wrote a response. Though Jonas doesn't condone the activity, he gives some possible justifications for Matt's decision that are worth considering.

And I don't want to get caught up in semantics, but it's definitely spam. Please see how Google and Yahoo define "search engine spam."

March 31, 2005: Wordpress.org now has a pagerank of 0/10, which means they've been effectively removed from Google search results (for now). The article results have all been removed from Yahoo, as well.

Fortunately, someone removed all of the Hot Nacho articles from the Wordpress.org site completely. It looks like the entire /articles directory was removed, so I'm sure Google will be adding Wordpress.org back to its index soon. Does anyone know if they were removed by someone at Wordpress or by someone at Hot Nacho? If you know, please leave me an e-mail.

I closed comments on the thread because it was devolving into a flamewar. Please try to keep an open mind until Matt has an opportunity to respond. Jonas Luster posted another update to his site which is worth reading.

Comments
What strikes me first is that this isn't really out in the open which, combined with advertising, causes all sorts of anime-worry-sweat to jump from my head. Since WP is cut off from the content and the cashflow, I don't have problems with the arrangement.

Being raised by an economics prof. made me immediately think of this in terms of a market. WP has a lot of good will from giving away its product under the GPL, but good will generally doesn't put food on the table. What they've been able to do is turn their considerable PageRank™ into real cash, via this company and AdSesnse-as-micropayments. I wonder if a PR exchange rate will develop, like what has happened with MMORPGs.

Google might have real problems with this because they're interested in putting the best information at the top; inbound links just infers what the best information is. I imagine they (like you) would see this as spam and possibly remove WP from their indexes. It's their ball, they will take it home if they want to. WP might find themselves blacklisted from Google's indexes if Google sees this as spam.

posted by George Hotelling on March 30, 2005 12:08 PM

Surely it doesn't help the fight against spammers.

It also clearly undermines the rel="nofollow" initiative that is trying to clean up search engine results.

posted by hudson on March 30, 2005 12:11 PM

I'm trying very hard to be rational.

Gaming search engines like that really, really bothers me.

I signed up at TextDrive last month, and one of the highlights of that process was being able to earmark a percentage of my sign up fees to an open source project.

A lot of the people I know and like use WordPress, it was by far the best known (to me) project on the list, and everything I'd heard about the software itself was positive.

I've never regretted charity more.

I accept that money is important and that it leads to progress, but ethics are important too, especially from a project that prides itself on subscribing to principles of Open Source.

Why did Wordpress not announce the new source of income to their users? Because they new it skirted the lines of acceptable behaviour.

I can't take my donation back, but I can take away my support of the project.

posted by Rob Drimmie on March 30, 2005 12:15 PM

I am also not an active Wordpress user, though I'm certainly a fan and have tinkered with the software on more than one occassion. But as someone who's collaborated on a number of open web projects, I agree that organizers should disclose commercial plans and other potential sources of income to both contributors and to collaborators. I think such a degree of transparency is necessary to mainain a true open-source spirit. Matt should probably have run his revenue options by the community of coders and contributors before putting it into place, and should at the very least present a page that explains all this for me to consider before I donate to the cause.

And hey, I'm all for gaming Google when it works to support something worthwhile. In this case, I want to see Wordpress continue to thrive. But the spirit of open source is democratic, and democracies require transparency to survive.

posted by sixfoot6 on March 30, 2005 12:15 PM

I must say, I do not see the problem, and can't agree with what you are suggesting that open source projects be held to a higher level, or transparency. These projects are free to the public, which means they do not make money for the authors. The authors are basically not compensated for their work. Why should anyone care, or have the right to question how that person makes money to be able to continue developement. As an open source author, I do not see anything wrong with what he has done. As long as he is not using the downloaded files to spread the spam, he is free to use his pageranking however he likes.

Open sources is about giving to the community. This is not a business, and this is not a democracy. If you want to contribute to the cause, you are doing so to further the giving to the public, not to make money. And to me, it is no one elses business.

posted by Ryan Guill on March 30, 2005 12:33 PM

This is an incredibly dirty tactic, especially for an open-source project. Beyond that, they're using methods that Google is most definitely opposed to. The use of hidden links (check the bottom of any of the article pages) and the use of the site's high Pagerank to bring in traffic through keyword spamming are more than reason enough for Google to ban the site all together. (reference)

If WordPress chooses to sell advertising space on their site, up-front, so be it. It's their site, and they have carte blanche to take any necessary actions to pay the bills. But, when an organization uses "illegal" methods, not to mention hypocritical, as noted earlier with the reference to their backing of no-follow to prevent spam, there is a problem. I use WordPress personally and have been for nearly a year now, but I am quite concerned with this development. It's all a bit too shady for me.

posted by Samuel on March 30, 2005 12:39 PM

This does leave a bad taste in the mouth. But they should have been open about it.

Andy, I wish you had waited on this one since Matt is out of station. And can't respond before the 'angry mob' hits.

posted by Sunny on March 30, 2005 12:41 PM

Leaving aside the ethics of WP doing this for a moment, I wonder why/how this even works. If Google sees 100k links to the main WP site, and then 120k articles show up on the server, but aren't linked to from anywhere, why instantly transfer the pagerank of the main page with all the new subpages? Also, unless this hotnacho has a linkfarm pointing to the articles, I don't even see a way for me or the googlebot to get to the articles from the main WP site.

Shouldn't google treat wordpress.org like they probably treat geocities.com? I assume Google gives the main geocities page a ton of pagerank, but if you startup geocities.com/foonewuser you shouldn't get the same pagerank or be deemed worthy by search engines just because you're on a highly linked server.

Is there a link from wordpress.org to the articles section that I'm not seeing that the googlebot could see? If there isn't, it seems possible that Google could fix pagerank by not spreading it to any new page on a server, especially those completely unrelated to the main site. If the articles were truly good and linked to by thousands of others, then by all means elevate their rank, but every new page on a server should start with a rank of zero, no?

posted by Matt Haughey on March 30, 2005 12:44 PM

Last time I checked, bandwidth is pretty expensive. I assume from what I've read that Matt is just trying to cover the cost of hosting and distributing a project that is so popular. It wasn't the best choice to make that money by 'gaming' search engines, and wordpress will have to deal with the consequences, be it google search engine flak or community uproar. But hey:

http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/03/30/wordpres.shtml

quote:

Originally posted by bit_pusher:
For us noobs just starting out, it would be nice to see how all of you heavy hitters are doing, so that we can set some realistic goals. Stuff I'd like to see are:

Number of domains/ Hits per month/ Date first started/ Monthly revenue/ and maybe industries you target

I know I answered this before a while ago, we were pulling a #2 for a targeted search term. Now getting #1 and #2 on Yahoo and MSN.

Calls and sales are coming in.

SEC has been great. We started using it when I registered here.

Jeff

Ringo... Loves all things opensource. Ringo thinks SEC should be opensource.

Hi,

It occured to me today when researching terms at Wordtracker that number of hits can be irrelevant as a bald statistic.

If your term is 'Sex' there are 300,000+ searches per day.

My number one term, the one I most would love to have number 1 for, only gets 4500 hits daily. That's it.

My second tier term gets less than 1000 hits.

Some of you get that many hits daily. I would have to be getting every single hit, meaning no other sites got any, to get 5500 a day.

So if I get 55 hits a day I am getting 1% of all the traffic on the web in my industry!

If I get 550 hits a day I am getting 10%. For a multi billion dollar industry (I sell insurance).

There are terms that we are getting (according to wordtracker) nearly half!

We have number one positions on MSN and Yahoo, not google yet (sandbox?) for niche search terms that only get a few dozen searches a day, we get hits every day, so we are getting our share.

Just another way to look at it.

Jeff

Well, I think that the searches per day on wordtracker are only good in comparison to statistics for other searches per day. They use dogpile to get their data, and it is unclear how frequently they update their database. As well, there may be 300,000 searches for sex daily on dogpile, but I can guarantee you that on Google the result is probably 10 times that.

Peter

Hi Peter,

I'm sure you're correct about the numbers being larger, but the principle still stands.

I have a client who is very specialized, his site gets number 1 on all engines, but it's an obscure specialty; let's say he restores antique x-ray machines. How often is "x-ray machine restoration" searched for? Compared to "sex"?

The niche I work in doesn't have any terms that get even 1% of the traffic of "sex", "britney spears", "music" etc.

Just saying, I may be dominating my industry for hits on my website, and still have only 10% as many hits as others on this forum.

So when newbies ask "how many hits are you getting" it seems like a useless indicator to me, unless you also reveal your key term and # of hits.

BTW, we are getting #1 for many of our terms now, and we are getting more hits every month. SEC has been great!

Jeff

Hello RV,

I just came acroos this forum in my attempt to learn more about SEC. I noticed you post and I am impressed with your results. Sometime later this month I will purchase a copy of the software. Do you mind pointing me where I could get a copy of "the cracked copy of the adwords keywords software I found searching for keyword generators online".

I am also open to your suggestion in making SEC most effective for my sites when I get to that stage.

Regards.

On the help tab, I click my "cloaker url" ending with .pl, and a cloaked site comes up. I click on any of the links in there and I get a bad page error. I am using advanced config, no addons. Any idea what I'm missing here?

ash

Permissions possibly?

I've reset the permissions on the index.pl file to 755. This file was at 655 or something like that and had somehow changed. Once I did that, the first page of the cloaked page worked, but the links within do not work. Still scratching my head on this one...
ash

Hi,

I just joined the board. I used cloaker a couple of years ago and it worked well. I just got through installing it again and i only have the cloaker program itself: (No Upgrades).

I fully optimed all my sites with the cloaked links using htaccess and disallowing manage.pl, plus i also renamed the index.pl file just to be sure. In my pages, I only used my cloaked word in the links, ie: http:www.mysite.com/cloakword/cool-keyword-combo.html and on my important pages, I used all multiple variations of the cloaked html link.

In the keyword area, I used 100 to 150 different keyword combos, i adjusted my density in advanced to 6% and I made my own links using only "/" with each link having my cloakword and a single keyword phrase! (Iused them all, which gives me about 125 or so links.

I put a lot of meta code in the cloaker pre-headers, and other html coding surrounrding the links in my header and footer areas in the advanced options.

I listed all that above, because I want you to know what I have done so that I can get good answers to the following questions!

1. The add-on programs: Are they necessary, since all the content is cloaked and I have forced a multitude of titles and descriptions to the cloaked pages?

2. As far as I can see, cloaker only cloaks the index page (a single page). I looked at the page stuffer configuration, and this is nice for a single page (or a second page). But what about a site that has 23 different pages, each with unique content and targeting a different set of keywords?

(2a) My thoughts on question #2 would be to install cloaker in different directories where the pages are stored, would this work?
(2b) Another thought that crossed my mind, would be to create a subdomain for each separate and unique web page, then install cloaker into that subdomain. Would this work?
(2c) My third thought is only a half thought, I am accustomed to editing my index.cgi file for subdomains. I already have 472 personal subdomains. Are there any re-routing measures that can be used to use cloaker to work on these other pages as well? ((( Even if I have to install cloaker multiple times on the server))).

THANKS FOR LETTING ME POST MY NOOB QUESTIONS, I HOPE YOU GUYS GOT SOME GREAT ANSWERS!!!

kloacking... If you go into the Keywords tab, at the bottom, you will notice a list of URLs... Cloaker uses these URLs from the initial index.pl page to send the engines to those new pages. They in turn will be indexed.

Peter

WOW -- I am pretty impressed with what I'm seeing here. I've owned SEC for about two years now, but never really did anything with it. I think it's time to put my small investment to good use.

Looks like the people here know what they're talking about and are experts in the software. Hope you won't mind the occasional 'newbie' question when it comes to cloaking.

Take care,

M

Of course not

read read read ............

then ask ask ask..........

Started with the cloaking on 3 aug, hits went from almost nothing to 44 hits per hour,
Sales have increased to 9 or 10 a day on this particular site.

here are the hit stats by search engine as of today. Used to get 10 to 15 hits a day prior to using this system.

Yahoo 6441 58.%
Google 2063 18.%
Msn 1882 17.%
Other 539 6.%
AOL 119 1.%

I agree! You have to read and read. I set a certain amount of time each time just for research and networking. Good Luck.

Yes, reading can be very rewarding
For almost 3 days, I've read almost an hundred pages here. But I've signed up just today.

I bought SEC several years ago, and as an affiliate sold several, several SEC scripts (and Peter, throught Clickbank, rewarded me well ), but I never used the script myself. Maybe it's time to try it out. I also already bought some IO keyw.

For years I've only used white hat techniques, but maybe it's time to try this out, in completely separate domains and servers (and some Spidercode services too).

Bob,
How many keywords / phrases are you using to get those kinds of results? I'm a new user and have read anything from 50 to 600 phrases. Any info from anyone would be greatly appreciated.

CX

It depends on your content category... it has less to do with how many keywords your use, and more to do with who you are up agaist in the SEs.

I can get 10,000 listings for 'rubby baby monkey brains' because nobody else has them.. see what I mean?

Jonathan

quote:

Originally posted by JonathanLIVE:
I can get 10,000 listings for 'rubby baby monkey brains' because nobody else has them.. see what I mean?

Now if you could only find some to sell! So would it be safe to say that a more competetive product would probably need more keywords and phrases?

CX