WordPress Under Fire for Search-Engine Spamming
“One of the most popular Weblog-publishing tools, WordPress, is stirring a controversy over search-engine gaming because it included thousands of articles related to popular search terms on its Web site while largely hiding them from site visitors.Bloggers and search-engine marketers are accusing the open-source WordPress project of spamming the major search engines, while at the same time being one of the advocates in an effort to combat comment spam in blog postings.“
In a nutshell, the lead developer of WordPress took money to link to articles that are invisible to regular visitors to wordpress.org, but are seen as links by crawlers. The result is that the weight given to the articles by search engines is increased by the volume of traffic to WordPress. Disclosure: this blog is powered by WordPress.