Developers Raise Concerns About WordPress.com Plugin Listings Outranking WordPress.org on Google Search
WordPress core developer John Blackbourn sparked a heated discussion yesterday when he posted an image of his WordPress User Switching plugin ranking higher for the WordPress.com listing than the page on WordPress.org. Why has @wordpressdotcom replicated the entire https://t.co/oTA9NDVkFk plugin directory on its .com domain name? Searching for some plugin names now results in the .com page ranking higher than .org. Fuck the long term health of the FOSS project, let's make some money, right? pic.twitter.com/UD40BN3Z6g— John Blackbourn (@johnbillion) September 13, 2023 Blackbourn later apologized for the inflammatory wording of the original post, but maintains that .com plugin listings being displayed higher in search results is not healthy for the open source project. “This was a frustrated 2AM tweet so I could have worded it better, but the point still stands,” he said. “The plugin pages on dotcom are little more than marketing landing pages for the dotcom service and they’re strongly competing with the canonical dotorg pages. That’s not healthy.” Several others commented about having similar experiences when searching for plugins, finding that the WordPress.com often ranks higher, although many others still see WordPress.org pages ranked highest. Blackbourn said his chief concern “is the process that introduced the directory…
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