OSWD.org - White Hat? Black Hat? Not guilty? <strong>Updated!</strong>

• Updated: The hidden link at http://www.dos.state.ny.us has been removed soon after this publication.
• Small discussion of the fact took place at SitePoints forums.
• I received several messages from people not happy with OSWD.org because of the fact that there were no updates on the site for quite a long time and no new templates got approved.
• OSWD.org recently updated it's collection of free templates - I did find my own free templates there, approved after about half a year period since I submitted them. I'm happy - dreams still come true :)
• New sites came to life due to unpleasant things that happened to OSWD>org and OpenWebDesign.org, namely: OpenDesigns.org and Layout Library
• I've took part in beta-testing of Layout Library and submitted some of my free templates there - I really liked the fact that they have their templates categorized to make it easier for the visitors to browse the designs, and allow of big size templates - up to 5 Mb - thus you can provide images and Photoshop file with a template.

This post was inspired by the recent scandal with OpenWebDesign(.org) discussed at AndreasViklund.com. The post in Andreas's blog "OpenWebDesign goes ugly" told a story of OWD being sold to a new owner who made all the efforts to get his money back asap - the sponsored links had been inserted into the footers of the templates submitted by the members of the community! When the news spread and people started to discuss it in OWD forum - the owner closed the forum (officially for upgrades). Later on the sponsored links were removed but Andreas was banned from OWD - that is, he was refused access to his own account at OWD and could upload new templates no more. The end of story - Andreas's account was restored (except for the admin rights) and most of the templates have been added back.

The result of the story - OWD lost the web designers' community support, people don't want to be loyal to somebody who has no respect for them.

Ugly situation? Yes. Unique situation? Don't think so. It's not the first time when leaders betray their users' trust.

Now what does this have to do with OSWD.org?

Everybody knows OSWD.org - a place for web designers to share their designs. Mecca for newbies and seasoned web design veterans. Hundreds of marvelous designs. The place to look for inspiration. The place web design community should be proud of.

Playing around with Seomoz Page Strength tool I always wondered how people manage to receive those highly valued links from .gov domains. I looked up the links pointing to OSWD.org. Better I didn't.

One of the sites linking to OSWD.org appeared to be New York Department of State official website - http://www.dos.state.ny.us/ Looking through the page I couldn't find the desired link. I thought the link text could be different from what I expected it to be (oswd.org or Open Web Design), so the thing I always do in such case - view the source code and use Ctrl+F to search for the specific URL.

Unpleasant surprise appeared to be in the code for 'Quick links' block:

<h2><strong>Quick links</strong></h2>
<div class="announce">
<ul><li><a href="http://appsext5.dos.state.ny.us/corp_public/">Search For Corporations or Business Entities</a></li>
<li><a href="http://appsext5.dos.state.ny.us/lcns_public/chk_load">Search For Licensees and Registrants</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.dos.state.ny.us/ooah/decisions.htm">Administrative Hearing Decisions </a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.dos.state.ny.us/fire/911program/911notices.htm">Emergency 911 </a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.dos.state.ny.us/lcns/Onappschedhome.htm">Real Estate Online Scheduler </a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.dos.state.ny.us/procurement/index.htm">Procurement Lobbying Guidelines </a></li>
<li><a href="http://oswd.org/"></a></li>
</ul>

What's that? A hidden link? Google in it's Webmaster Guidelines puts up * Avoid hidden text or hidden links. * as the first list item in 'Quality guidelines - specific guidelines' The fact of finding a hidden link is not really something that can stir a lot of interest of the Internet community - and that's not the aim of my post anyway.

Still there are things about that fact that strike me as strange. The first - it's not a link from some commonplace website, it's a hidden link from the Department of State official website. I wonder, what it takes to get such kind of a link from such kind of a website? Who has enough authority to put it there? Who is the webmaster or webdesigner of New York Department of State website - some fan of OSWD.org? Did the administration of OSWD.org know about that fact? Strange if they didn't though I permit such a possiblity. If they knew of the fact - why would they need that kind of link if they are already in the top search engine results?

Too many questions, no answers yet, and a bitter taste of disappointment. Do you still believe in equal competition?