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.