Matt,
Given that you seem to be abusing your PageRank to increase revenue for wordpress.org, I would like for you to share to the world:
a) how much money you have received (google revenue and donations)
and b) where all that money has gone.
Have you at least shared it with the WordPress contributors? All of them? Any of them?
I must say that you just might not make it in the business world, since you have to have deep pockets to play this dirty and win. I can now understand why you don’t play well with others, and use NIH personally to scrub out good ideas and ‘create’ new software instead of enhancing the existing.
Scott Sanders
Popularity: 11%
Third Update: Google dropped wordpress.org like a hot rock (good for them), then Matt dropped -9000px like a bad date, and then Google gave the love back. To remember this occasion, why don’t you buy the t-shirt?
Second update: Slashdot picked up the story, but there is at least one fair and balanced comment.
I really wish that Matt wouldn’t have taken this into his own hands, screwing several developers along with himself.
Update: It seems the articles are 404′ing now, but the source on the front page is still there. I have captured a PDF screenshot of one of the articles for the world to see what Matt was doing, packaged in a google bomb: WordPress Page Rank Abuse and WordPress Search Engine Cloaking.
So, Matt has decided that the only way to pay for wordpress.org is by deceiving the search engines into beleiving that he knows everything about insurance/home buying/etc. According to the following, he has over 120,000 ‘articles’ published, purely for drving in the google revenue. This in itself is not bad. The bad part is hiding it from the actual users of the wordpress.org site, by positioning the content 9000 pixels to the left. Simply view source on the wordpress.org site, and look at the bottom.
So many people are on top of this, I really don’t have any more to add, other than if Matt wants to continue this practice, Google is probably going to forget about him and wordpress.org. Is Matt abusing his PageRank? My opinion: ABSOLUTELY!
Links:
Popularity: 11%
