I was told to take my toys and go home.

Well, not literally. I was kicked off Wordpress.com yesterday. It was more than a little unexpected. 20 blogs or so GONE and my access denied.

Sure I knew many were complaining about Wordpress.com marking their blog as “mature” and removing them from the tag surfer. I also knew they didn’t allow affiliate links in posts. But I thought I was operating on the good side of the law.

I had corresponded with one of the moderators (Mark) about this a while back. On one of my blogs (Online Adventure) I had commented about Aweber and out of habit linked to Aweber using my affiliate link. I got a warning message in my control panel and I immediately wrote to WordPress to find out what I had done wrong.

What Mark told me was I actually WASN’T in violation since they allow “a small number” of affiliate links; they just didn’t want spammy sites. He removed the warning and all was well with the world.

Somehow, I must have really ticked someone off yesterday.

My guess is someone read the last couple posts I did on getting high PR sites to link to you, decided that was a no-no and shut down my free blogs.

But here’s the thing…Wordpress.com is DESIGNED to use automatic, internal linking strategies to create high PR and high ranking web pages. Maybe Wordpress.com is like Fight Club—the first rule of Wordpress.com is you don’t talk about how to use Wordpress.com effectively in any commercial sense.

The real problem with the Wordpress.com gurus is they struggle with “marketing denial.”

There is a common belief among young, Web 2.0 professionals: Marketing is evil. As such marketing should be avoided and even punished. “It’s an open source world. Peace and harmony for all.”

But they really don’t believe marketing is evil. What they believe is obvious marketing and/or marketing by other people we don’t like is evil. Otherwise, if I market in such a way that it looks like I’m not marketing, then it’s all Kosher. If I am a leader in the open source movement then when I market, it’s cool.

Want some examples? Check out your Wordpress.com or Wordpress.org dashboard. Today there is a message encouraging you to buy Wordpress Hoodies. If that’s not intentional marketing, what is? But it’s OK because it’s the White Hats of Open Source.

I link to ProBlogger.net (a good guy in their minds) and it’s cool. I link to my own site which has no advertising and simply offers free content and resources and somehow that’s not cool.

Go figure.