I heard that Google is now treating Wordpress websites as Spam, is this true?

While I don't believe google is treating wordpress as spam,
but in the past when people would argue wordpress over
blogspot, I always pointed out that google owns blogspot.

So.....if one were to think logically about spam and junk
sites, which blog platform might be on the chopping block
in the near future....

While google may trim blogspot, they have been known to
cut a whole genre of sites.

I would not doubt that google has already thought long and hard
about de-valuing wordpress. Sort of the same thing as far
as google+ goes. De-valuing meant in more of a scale. In other
words, google would put blogspot over wordpress, google+ over
other socials, and certainly youtube waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over
any other wannabe video sites.

This only pertains to people who choose to live and die on
what google does.

Paul

You nailed it! That's pretty much where I was going with it...

Communities like Geocities (and all those lovely 90's neighborhoods), Blogspot, Tumblr made making a website a lot simpler than trying to teach the computer illiterate to install and/or use Wordpress. And hackers have been targeting any CMS of the time for ages as well. It will always happen when there are smart kids out there with a lot of time and curiousity on their hands.

This forum looks like a support forum for Wordpress because it is a forum about making money off websites. It's a biased sample.

I can't see why Google has to even worry about targeting Wordpress when their algorthim keeps the rot out of the serps to begin with. A site that is seen as an authority on Dogs is no less authorative because it uses Wordpress. That's silly.

It amazes me when people are faced with facts, plausible trends, possible issues in a format open for mature discussion it just sinks into name calling and immature diatribe.

If you do not have something constructive to contribute, why the ridiculing and name calling?

I think that it just took the internet out of the hands of prpgrammers and opened it up to others. Yes, many have abused that. But others who have no understanding of HTML can now put up a web site based on great, original content. I'm sure some programmers look down on those of us who never learned HTML. But I am still very proud of my main authortiy site and the 10,000 visitors a month to my site, and at least some of them agree. Why should one have to understand HTML and other coding to be able to be express their views on the internet?

LOL. You don't have '100s' of 'high-quality' blogs.

No one does. Not even AOL.

Bottom line, you seem like an incredibly rich, powerful, and smart person. My advice is to switch off the Wordpress platform because you're so worried about the future.

Make a custom CMS and get on with it. You clearly have the money and the expertise. No need to 'goof around' with Wordpress at your level of success.

There are wordpress sites with custom themes and you don't even notice they are on wordpress. If you use a default theme of course your site is gonna suck.

I've been following this thread with some interested and am amazed by how caught up some people are with it. Even as far as conducting research!

As a web company who use Wordpress as a CMS system for many SME clients, I should be running for hills and hiding if some of this garbage were to be believed.

The simple facts are that Google are starting to look very carefully at reducing web spam. And rightly so. I sit on both sides of the fence, and have IM based websites for my own personal gain, and I also run an offline web and SEO business. Google algorithm changes over the last few months have done an excellent job of reducing the visibility of terrible "thin" affiliate/adsense websites, whether they were built in Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal or hand coded in PHP & HTML.

Just because a 10 page website with poor content and thousands of PR0 un-related forum, web 2.0, bookmarking and blog comment backlinks disappears out of Google results, doesn't mean it has anything to do with the platform it was built in.

Google is doing an excellent job of reducing spam, whether we like it or not. It has NOTHING to do with the platform your sites are built in. It has EVERYTHING to do with the quality of sites we are building, and how useful they are to an end user.

There are no shortcuts, just focus on building a great site, that has useful content to an end user, isn't crammed with adverts above the fold and try and build links from reliable, relevant high PR pages and your website will be fine, no matter what platform it was built in.

After spending way to much time on this, I think I've identified the "WP penalty" discussed in this thread.

I believe it is not related to WP itself, but rather the penalties incurred from the effects and structures that WP sites generate in their raw form.

Here are a few things I found:

- Speed penalty - WP sites tend to be slower than HTML out of the box. We all know that G pays more attention to this these days as part of the customer experience. Compression, caching, attention to image size etc. can help alleviate this. WP sites tend to be bloated and sluggish and slower.

- Duplicate content penalty (onsite) - WP sites tend to put copies of your posts in all sorts of places: category pages, tag pages, archive pages, etc. This seems to be affected in Q311 with some type of change. Structuring a website to deal with these can help.

I found this is especially true with home page excerpts, I've just changed a home page from excerpts to a static page and improved ranking on a website that tanked last Q3 from a Google change. Note: the original excerpts on the home page didn't change in a year (so no dynamic effects here). The site just fell out of rankings in Q311, and now with a new home page, its coming back. BTW, both home pages had almost exactly the same KW density and LSI as well.

- Silo structure - WP sites have a default structure. It varies with some themes being better than others, but more attention needs to be paid to this. It kind of effects the "duplicate content penalty" above and the "linking patterns" discussion below. If you want to learn about the importance and structure of silos and how to deal with them, read all you can here at by our WF member "Yukon".

- Linking patterns - Another issue with WP sites is the internal page linking pattern which comes from default WP themes and many of the plug-ins that generate the page/post links for you. Study silo structures and their effect on page and post authority, and you will see the effect of bad internal linking and good internal linking. I believe I just happened to do a better job of this on HTML sites, but allowed WP do its thing on WP sites. That has to change.

Think of these patterns as G trys to figure out what your site is really all about, I believe in Q311 G began to pay more attention to internal links as a way of determining post/page importance (authority) on a site.

If your "about me" page had the exact same internal links to it as your post on "watermelons" with equivalent kw densities, etc they both had the same chances of ranking for "watermelons." In fact, with LSI and more words (to confuse and dilute) in a post, the G machine may have ranked the "about us" page higher for "watermelons." These are unintended consequences of algorithmic change.

So, after much experimentation and time, my conclusions to date are these:

1. Were WP sites affected by 2011Q3 G changes? Absolutely.

2. Were all WP site's ranking effected? Yes and no, because some sites handled some of the things listed here better than others. That's why we don't all see the same, uniform results.

3. Was Google targeting WP sites? Nope. I never really thought they would do this, it really didn't make any sense. It just seemed that way.

As an unintended consequence, WP tends to produce sites that produce some of the effects that Google was targeting in the Q311 update and maybe even with the new Panda releases. The key is to think about what G is looking for and see if your site "produces" it. I believe on page seo, site architecture, and plug-ins effect what they are looking for more than we know. This is why WP took a hit.

4. Does my ranking drop mean my site is spammy? Nope, not necessarily. Notice, I didn't comment on content. The reason I ignored all the comments in this thread on "spammy sites" etc is that I know of many duplicate content sites, 1 page junk sites, etc and they were not necessarily effected by the Q311 changes. My WP sites were pretty good looking with original content etc and they all took a big, uniform hit.

That just smacked of algorithmic mischief.

Good luck to all.

I own a small subscriber based Social Internet Marketing service that includes hosting.

So I have many subscribers. Many host with us as well as 3rd party hosting as do I. I actually have 3 different hosting solutions.

We have been very busy tooling up for a huge release of a lot of new services one being a portfolio of WP plugins and templates customized for our subscribers.

I love WP, I know WP and we develop for WP.

About a month ago I had some subscribers share some concern that their WP sites started to drop. It had been a few months since I had even looked at mine (I have several 100 of them all used for research and development).

Several had been hijacked with one having over 175,000 new EDITOR accounts. All had started to drop in rankings.

I deleted the WP on a few of them and put Veretekk CMS systems on them. They immediately turned around and started improving.

All of my subscribers that had expressed this issue with me also removed most of their WP blogs replacing them with other solutions and they all reported ranks returning and improving again.

So I started researching this. That's my job, market research. I grind myself into delirium researching.

I am discovering a trend that a large population of WP blogs that I have added into my research are losing rankings (not all but most of the ones I have researched so far).

The ones that I control and those people I have communicated that removed them and replaced with some option have experienced a positive result.

Some of my subscribers have become extremely anti WP. I think they are reacting illogically. There is a teend, but exactly what is casuing it is yet to be significantly identified.

But there is a trend that is negatively impacting a large population of WP blogs.

Matt Cutts runs his site on wordpress using the thesis theme.

enough said

haha that just made my night... being able to see through the html to the php, lol that's Big G for ya...