March 31, 2005
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Waxy has the story. Sad day for Wordpress.
I can’t believe Matt would resort to some underhanded cloaking technique to earn adsense cash. No one would have said anything if he was more open about the whole deal.
Update: Tons of people are flaming Wordpress and Matt over this. Lets all wait till he gets back from vacation and hear what he says. This is a big deal though. Imagine if he used Wordpress.org to link to a link farm - all sites linking back to Wordpress.org (a majority of the wordpress installs) could be banned in Google.
Michael Nguyen | Blogging | Comments (26)
December 24th, 2005 at 10:20 am
Matt did great job when he produce WP , now WordPress.org is 9 PR , this very high score can not be reached by any website , CNN ,BBC , Yahoo and these kind of world-class website are just reached 9 , Matt reach it , and we may see WordPress.org nearly reach 10 , Who Knows !!
December 29th, 2005 at 2:36 am
I agree with design, its takes time ans effort to reach where matt reached so let him benefit from it.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:01 pm
Hi, I like your site! I enjoyed browsing it. Thanks. In Dutch we say dank-je-wel 4 thanks))
February 17th, 2006 at 11:17 am
I think Matt deserves to make a few bucks, however, for someone I consider a professional, he should know better then cloaking.
March 20th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Great work!!! Wordpress the free blogger is picking up and I can see every tech in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India is having a blog powered by Wordpress.
April 23rd, 2006 at 11:19 pm
The short version: Mr. Mullenweg chose to make money by selling wordpress.org’s high Google pagerank to the worst kind of black-hat SEO scumsucker, the kind of person who makes a living off of poisoning search results.
Sure Mr. Mullenweg deserves to make a few bucks — but nobody deserves to make money by destroying the value of search engines for all the rest of us. That’s peeing in the community pool. His “apology” was spin and half-truths, and he continues to delete any non-sycophantic comments, no matter how polite. Of course he knew better than cloaking — he just didn’t think he’d get caught. To this day he has not shown any comprehension of, or remorse for, what he did wrong.
April 30th, 2006 at 6:30 am
I love Wordpress. It is so cool. Blogging is never easier than before.
May 19th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
Great blog! Keep it up.
June 20th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
title
Booya, check out this hot new side dude
September 12th, 2006 at 9:42 am
quik cash quik cash
November 3rd, 2006 at 7:47 am
If he can get away with it, and the people aren’t being hurt, whats the problem, 99% of users didn’t even notice it, and I would say a large percentage of those don’t care. Lay off.
November 19th, 2006 at 11:54 am
Get real underhanded cloaking
google and yahoo use some forum
of cloaking themselves.
It’s the small guys against the big guys.
Take google bmw.com was banned by google
and within 2 days google unbanned them.
Like to see that happen to any of us..
November 23rd, 2006 at 1:48 pm
Hi, is there any update onthis at all as I use a lot of wordpress blogs. It would be a shame to see them go after all the hard work.
Cheers
Mike
November 26th, 2006 at 3:45 am
I love wordpress and hope nothing serious will happen with this. Let’s wait and hear with Matt says.
December 7th, 2006 at 8:57 am
I’ve read on a couple of other blogs about this,… it looks like the writing IS truly on the wall!
Let’s wait and see. - Cheers, Kyle
December 14th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
I say good on him for making the money that we would all like but that said, cloaking was not the best way to impress people,
nice blog you have
Jimmy
January 6th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Yeah, I still don’t see google banning wordpress anytime soon because of this incident. Altough, this issue might be brought up another time during this year lol.
March 10th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Cloaking has always been a massive issue with the good use and the bad. But how is cloaking defined?
If I produce one site in English, French and German, Google will show each site accorinding to the visitors IP so they see the site in their local language.
Isn’t that similar to cloaking - showing a different version of a site depending who is looking at it?
yes, I know in the above example there is a good use for that but where do you draw the line that decides which form of cloaking is good and bad?
May 16th, 2007 at 3:35 am
I am sure Matt wouldn’t do anything to harm wordpress, he is a master of the internet and a very smart man.
May 24th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
i used wordpress and I’m liking it. with all the plug ins and things you can do on it i definitely would continue to use it forever.
June 2nd, 2007 at 12:20 am
Strange I am an avid Wordpress user, I generate plug-ins, themes, the works and usually keep up on the current news but I have not heard about this yet, I was just listening to him on a online radio show at webmasterradio.fm and he seemed like an alright person.
As for wordpress.org being a link farm that would destroy the company name right there, sure the platform is awesome but your right all those blogs could be banned for linking to a bad neibourhood and that could have some serious concequences for the company but I don’t think they would stoop to that level.
June 10th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
I think I’ve read something simillar a few days ago. I don’t remember where, might have been on digg.com or slashdot.
June 20th, 2007 at 2:31 am
All of the big search engines change their rules or algorithms in our evolving world. They now penalise link exchanges and blog farms and favour one way linking. They do not need to, nor do I think that they would, penalise all Wordpress sites because of one man’s actions.
April 17th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
It’s highly unlikely that the search engines would penalise all wordpress sites, as a fall back to Matt’s doing.
Another perspective to this whole issue, is the fact that the other part of the story ie Matt’s version is still to be known. He would know better, how to handle this rather sensitive issue.
regards rashmi
May 29th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Wordpress is the best blogging platform without a doubt.
June 17th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Hi all great information here and good thread to comment on.
Can I ask though - how did you get this picked up and into google news?
Very impressive that this blog is syndicated through Google and is it something that is just up to Google or you actively created?
Obviously this is a popular blog with great data so well done on your seo success..