Google The Punisher
Both Aaron and Danny have posted great follow-up pieces about the Wordpress spamming case. For those of you who don’t know about it, here’s a quick recap:
Last February, Wordpress developer Matt Mullenweg signed a deal with a notorious search engine spammer named Chad Jones. (aka HotNacho). In exchange for cash, Matt agreed to host several thousand "articles" on his site that had nothing to do with blogging (or even software development for that matter). He then put up some hidden links to the off-topic content on the homepage of wordpress.org.
The theory behind the little experiment was simple; the combination of high TrustRank and PageRank of wordpress.org should propel all the HotNacho articles to the top of Google SERPS.
And that’s exactly what happened. Life was Good. Matt had finally found a steady revenue stream to help keep the Wordpress project up and running.
But everything changed in March when a very noble blogger stumbled across the offensive HotNacho content while searching at Google. It was a tough decision, but he knew the web would be a better place if he did the right thing, so he went ahead and publicly outted Matt for conduct unbecoming an open source God.
Within minutes of his post, the proverbial shit hit the fan. Blogs across the web began debating what Matt’s punishment should be. And at the same time, everyone started their stopwatches to see how long it would take for Google to react.
Turns out, it didn’t take long. Within a couple of hours, Google representitives were posting comments about their guidlines applying to everyone, and pages from the Wordpress site began disappearing from the Google index. Everyone began raving over the fact that Google did the right thing and went ahead and penalized Wordpress, even though they are a very important site that people expect to find.
Fast forward to today…….
Wordpress.org has suffered no long-term effects from their contribution to the degradation of the web. Their "ban" for spamming lasted about a day. The entire site is well indexed and continues to enjoy a huge volume of traffic from Google.
So what about Mr. Nacho? Well he is currently considering changing his company name to Cold, Soggy Tostada. According to him, Google used whois data to track down and penalize several sites he owns that have nothing to do with his article writing business. The only reason for the penalty seems to be the fact that they are owned by him.
Now I haven’t spent any real time investigating Chad’s network to see if their might possibly be some other reason that Google could use to justify banning the sites. And quite frankly, I don’t really care if there is. The mere fact that Google took punitive action against the author of the content rather than punishing the publisher should be enough to finally establish as fact that most of their public comments on the topic of search spam and how their rules apply to everyone equally is a load of crap.
The truth of the matter is if Google really applied the same standards to all sites as they claim, then wordpress.org would have been eradicated from the face of the earth. No amount of begging would have brought it back. But that didn’t happen because doing so would require having enough balls to take a stand based on principle.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not naive enough to believe that any search engine would have the balls to make such a stand. The way in which Google dealt with this issue is pretty much the norm, and I accept that. What isn’t the norm at other search engines is constantly spending a huge amount of time and energy telling the whole world how morally superior you are.
That’s the irritating part. Why can’t Google just be honest? Doing so would make everyone’s life quite a bit easier. I know that if I were ever fortunate enough to get my site into Google’s trusted club, I would certainly want to know upfront that membership comes with a "get out of jail free" pass.
Wouldn’t you?
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Google’s dishonesty is only made even more astoundingly funny given their “Do No Evil” philosophy.
I guess it depends on who is defining the term evil. I think I dated a few girls who did the same thing in the past.