This is the geek pedant in me speaking now: wordpress.org is not the same as WordPress the blogging software, and it is not the same as the tens of thousands of WordPress blogs out there. Which means that headlines like Slashdot’s WordPress Banned by Google for Spamming really annoy me. That should be WordPress.org Banned by Google for Scamming Adsense.

Creating link farms, chains of self-referencing websites, cross linking, and some of the other things that people do to game the search engines and in this case profit from ad placements is wrong, no doubt, but it is not spamming. Spamming has always meant sending out unsolicited content, whether by news posting, email, or blog and guest book comments.

What Matt has allowed to take place on his server, has nothing to do with any of those things. Google have rightly pulled those pages from their index because their terms and conditions state: No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.. Nothing whatsoever to do with spamming.

The only mention of spamming in those terms and conditions is … In particular, avoid links to web spammers…. These articles didn’t have links to anywhere (as far as I remember), they were purely designed to attract high paying Google ads and thus click-throughs to legitimate Google advertisers!

The things people are positing about Google ‘having it in for’ WordPress because of Blogger or about everyone else’s WordPress blogs somehow being affected by this, are just nonsense. Get a grip people! Stick to the facts.

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