HotNacho On The WordPress Spam Saga

WordPress Spam Scam Explained
is an undated article giving the Hot Nacho
side of the
Wordpress spam saga from owner Chad Jones. It might not be new, but I just
heard about it via
Aaron’s SEO Book blog. It highlights how while WordPress was back in Google
within a day, HotNacho and other sites owned by Jones remain banned.

That’s the biggest takeaway, showing exactly what I said in my article about
the WordPress case. If a site is important enough, search engines simply cannot
ban it despite spamming issues because it will hurt relevancy. If you type in
[wordpress], then you want to find the WordPress site. But if you’re a nobody
site, look out — spam a search engine, and there’s no particular reason for
them to let you back in.

Of course, there are going to be people searching for HotNacho on Google and
not finding it because of the ban, and that’s actually bad relevancy and
somewhat troublesome overall for a service that’s supposed to be helping
organize the world’s information.

It’s one thing to ban a site for ranking well on non-navigational terms. But
if I type [hotnacho] or [hot nacho] into Google, I really ought to be able to
find that site as being relevant for that navigational query. Right now, it
doesn’t come up. It doesn’t come up at Yahoo, either, which wasn’t
impressed
with the HotNacho software.

Yeah, it’s sucky to include a link at all to something that you feel like is
undermining the quality of your service (and sorry Chad, the pages I saw were
sucky and being semi-automated rather than fully-automated in creation doesn’t
somehow make them better). But for some perspective, what do you think is worse,
HotNacho or Nazis? Go search for [nazi] on Google, and it will happily send you
off to the American Nazi party. But HotNacho? Oh, no — now that would be evil.

Postscript: Be sure to see Greg Boser’s funny observations

here, as well.