I gotta cut the guy a little slack. He's providing an INCREDIBLE service to anyone who wants it (WordPress) and is doing nothing that thousands of other companies do. Sure, it's unethical, but who is it really hurting?

If it were just some schmuck pulling it on his personal web site, I would say DOS attack his site.

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I dont' see what's the problem with it, I've done worse on the internet. There are no laws here (not as I'm happy about that, but it's fact...)

There may be little or no legislation regarding the internet in some countries, but ethics are not any different on the internet. And, I think on the net unethical behaviour is punished by the community more than in real life. You have to play it fair otherwise you get screwed within 24 hours. I don't think taking advantage of your google ranking is breaking any laws, but it's againts Google policies, so it's considered unethical.

Btw I feel a bit uncomfortable about the fact that google actually controls a very important part of the world media. If they decide to drop your ranking nobody will find your site. It's almost silencing you. It's not a realistic danger, but you get where I'm going with this.

When we moved cb to our own domain creativebits.org from another domain the google ranking dropped from 6 to 0. This meant that almost nobody ever found this site by googling it. This dropped the daily page views by 70%. Since it's mostly visitors who click on ads, if this was a commercial site, we would've went bankrupt within a few weeks.

I've never been in google's directory before, frankly, I couldn't care less. Never will, either, I guess.