Honest Marketing Secrets

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I’ve just recently discovered that WordPress has changed its terms of service (TOS) for blogs hosted on their sites. This is good news.

Here’s a quote from the page where WordPress gives examples of types of blogs they are deleting:

And here are some examples of blogs that are banned from WordPress.com (all of these fall under the general heading of “spam blogs”, or splogs, and we will be deleted as soon as we find them or they get reported to us):

Scraper blogs: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains all or mostly stolen and unoriginal content, it’s gone!

SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.

Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs. To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category. We’re only talking about blogs that are primarily designed to promote different affiliate programs.

And here’s a quote from WordPress TOS. The relevant quote is currently highlighted in purple on their site:

By making Content available, you represent and warrant that:

[ . . . ]

the Content is not spam, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);

Here is the WordPress TOS Page

This should create a pretty huge shakeup and I expect it will clear the decks and make ranking well in the search engines a whole let easier for those of us putting great, original content on the web. It will be very interesting to see how it pans out these next few weeks.

[UPDATE] Please note, I believed, based on my research that this was a new development, but right now I can’t verify whether the terms have, in fact changed recently, or have been this way for some time. I’ll let you know if I hear anything regarding timing and would appreciate any comments as well. Yup, I may have jumped the gun a bit. Thanks for understanding.