On 18 November 2013 17:46, Nathan Larson <nathanlarson3141(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If Google agrees, they
can stop giving wikis in general, or certain wikis, such influence over
pagerank. The spammers have market incentives to become more sophisticated,
but so does Google, since their earnings depend on keeping their search
results relevant and useful, so that people don't switch to competitors
that do a better job.
Market forces are not our friend. Google's incentive is to *ignore* spammy
links, not to stop them existing; spammers' incentive is to get their links
wherever they possibly can, and particularly in the places where they're
effective, not to avoid putting links where they're not effective. Pure
market forces would leave wikis (large and small) attacked by progressively
more sophisticated spam, search engines being progressively smarter about
ignoring the spam, and wikis *still being served with as much spam as
before* (and it being progressively harder to identify and remove).
Wikis can only participate in the arms race by exposing publicly the
*extent* to which spamming is pointless. Google publicising the fact that
nofollow is ignored (and hence spamming is pointful) is actually a really
unhelpful thing for them to do. If they really have taken the nofollow
weapon away from wikis altogether, then we need to find a way to get it
back.
--HM