In terms of rankings, sure Wordpress is excellent. However, the problem with them is that they are "too careful". I recently had a blog suspended for reasons like: "blog is made for search engines", "affiliate blog", etc. All I was doing simply posting keyword-optimized articles, and sending traffic to my landing page. So you know, no affiliate links, no spamming or anything *bad*...... I don't like spending too much time on something, which I don't have full control on and when some guys behind the scenes can mess up my business in few clicks...
Well I have had the opposite happen, I rarely if ever have a problem. I have had one shutdown, but that was way over the top it terms of what I was doing and deserved it It sounds like you are not making it human enough. A good style I use that works is a review where you say "Hey I'm really into yoga, and my buddy Mike send me a cool site discussing the 7 best tips for yoga". Well I went to the site, and it did this, and that, and I thought this was cool. Blah blah blah. Keyword optimized articles? Maybe you are over optimizing it? I don't do any keyword density count, or anything like that. All I do is: - 1. Keyword in title 2. Keyword (and 3 or 4 related other ones) in the article. That's it! It's all about finding the formula that works and doing it. Just remember if it's happening to you, it will be happening to others, and guess what? They won't be using it either. But if, like me you figure out how to use it and not get banned? Your laughing! wordpress.com has an alexa ranking of 27 ! Only 26 other websites have more traffic (according to alexa) on the entire internet! Do you think that wordpress is an authority site as far as google is concerned? Yes! Do you think wordpress.com get's a heap of traffic? Yes! Do you think it's worth investing a bit of time and experimenting to leverage off the back of this? Yes! If I can do it, so can you (or anyone else for that matter). So give it another go, tone down the "affiliate" side of things, just write a story, but use your keywords and link to your money page! Good luck! Cheers Tim