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.

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 clone on .com either disregarded its potential impact on .org in favor of inbounds or never considered it in the first place – both very concerning given the ranking power

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