WordPress Wellen schlagen hoch

es war fast nicht anders zu erwarten, daß sich bei Waxy.org aufgrund der billigen SEO-Tricks von WordPress.org die Leute die Köpfe heissreden und langsam die halbe Blogosphere auf dieses Thema aufspringt. JLuster – ein Entwickler von WordPress – hat sich auch schon bereits zu Wort gemeldet, da „Chief“ Matt zZt flüchtig ist… quatsch… der ist gerade auf Urlaub in good old Europe.

Ich hoffe nunmehr nicht, daß die Leute dabei vergessen, daß Menschen Fehler machen und man deswegen niemanden an die Wand stellen muß.

Update: Google ist da anderer Meinung, denn WordPress.org ist in Google nicht mehr auffindbar und das Pagerank der Seite ist Null. Na super, das ging ja sauschnell und ist ein riesiger Schaden für das Projekt. Warum? Google nennt das Cloaking und mag das nicht leiden! (via Virtuelvis)

Anbei einige Auszüge aus der Debatte von Waxy.org:

Matthias:

That Matt has to take such desperate and (IMHO) stupid sneaky sleazy measures might be an indication the community doesn’t care enough about the project to keep it alive financially.

So if you don’t like this /articles „experiment“, put your money where your mouth is and donate more, not less. It’s as simple as that.

v-twin:

but what’s the implication here that makes me squirm? it’s more than, „spam is evil! shame, shame!“ my romanticized image of someone who builds blog tools is someone who buys into the dream, at least a little–who takes the gamble. it’s someone who wants to keep driving the barrier to entry for getting content onto the web lower and lower. blogging has brought us new voices, and some of them are damn good. i say so, pagerank says so–the web says so. but pay-for-play changes that. high placement on google is zero-sum: someone’s gonna get knocked into the oblivion of page 2 when spam rockets to the top, and the blogger with the $0 wordpress install doesn’t stand much of a chance in that kind of arms race.

Ken Deji:

So these are „SPAM“. Just not email spam. If you want to mince words. And the negative position/hiding of links on WP homepage is 100% blackhat SEO stuff. This whole thing stinks so much that semantics won’t help him here.

Photomatt is either really naive to think this is harmless, or really ignorant not to know anything about Adsense-inspired garbage content spam. Whatever the case, this incident paints him in a very negative light.

Michael Moncur:

I have to say this whole thing is leaving a really bad taste in my mouth about WordPress. I think Matt should do the right thing and drop it, or at least disclose everything and let the community decide.

Samuel:

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.