WordPress Site Cheats Search Engines?

Andy Baio of has written an interesting piece, detailing how WordPress.org is using their high Google PageRank to profit from hidden links using AdSense. I’m not an SEO expert, but I figure if you can glean additional revenue from your site’s popularity to attempt to offset the costs that it would take to get that kind of PageRank, more power to you. It’s Google’s responsibility to fix their search engine, although I do admit what they’ve done is a bit shady. I certainly sympathize with their plight, and I hope this doesn’t taint the image of the software too much, because I love what they’ve done. Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone else stepping up to the plate to pay them for their software, so they’re sort of in a position where they need to get revenue in any way possible. Thus is the plight of open source. It’s hard to give away your work and make a successful business at the same time.