Tag Archives: PageRank

Follow you, follow me

February 15, 2007 – 12:42 pm

Two years ago today, we released WordPress version 1.5. This was a pretty major release that introduced several new features that are still major staples of the current 2.1 branch: the Dashboard, Themes, and Pages. It also added a minor new change which was mildly controversial to some: comments were automatically flagged with the ‘nofollow’ attribute.

The rel="nofollow" idea had good intentions: to give content producers a way to link to another site without implying that they approve of it. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Blogging, Microformats, Plugins, Search, Spam, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (86)

WordPress Scandal: Photomatt Responds

April 1, 2005 – 1:04 pm

Matt finally had a chance to make a response to the recent WordPress SEO scandal. Here’s a small snippet:

The articles hosted content thing was just a short-term experiment, an interesting idea (original and relevant Wikipedia-type content on the site) that was badly implemented. As an experiment it could have been conducted much better than it was. The content should have been more topical to WP issue, I should have kept up with the content that was going up, the links should have never had the overflow CSS, and I should have discussed it with more people. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Community, SEO, Spam, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (5)

WordPress Scandal Update

April 1, 2005 – 10:30 am

Matt “scum of the earth” Mullenweg, vacationing in a not-very-wired portion of Italy, finally got wind of all the villagers with torches and pitchforks who have been searching for him.

I have close to a thousand emails and countless blog posts and comments to go through, but I’ll try to synthesize everything and respond ASAP, I think it’s important because some people seem to be spinning things quite maliciously. If you have a specific question please send me an email and I’ll do my best to respond personally or on the blog, even if you’ve already decided I’m the scum of the earth.

– Back Online

What a way to spend your vacation, eh?

In the meantime, the offending hidden links have been removed from the WordPress.org website, the HotNacho articles are gone, and Google has restored the site’s pagerank.

Update: Andy at waxy.or has another update which includes a statement from HotNacho.

Chad Jones, the creator of Hot Nacho, contacted me and asked me to post this statement. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Community, SEO, Spam, WordPress | Also tagged , | Comments (8)

The WordPress/HotNacho SEO Debacle

March 31, 2005 – 1:01 pm

Debate is raging over the “WordPress SEO Spam” issue. Please pay special attention to the disclaimer at the beginning of Andrew’s post (emphasis mine):

Disclaimer. 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. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Community, SEO, Spam, WordPress | Also tagged , , , | Comments (33)