Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 10:29 AM, peter green plugwash@p10link.net wrote:
But you cannot exclude that you are higher in search engines cause of links from Wikipedia articles and images ;)
Doesn't wikipedia screw over the sites it reffers to theese days by using nofollow?
Screw over? Hardly. We're not all playing some game of who can get the highest on the search results. I understand some people are, fine, but thats not what we're doing.
Moreover, "nofollow" is poorly named and the poor naming results in substantial misunderstanding. The way modern search engines utilize nofollow is primarly as an indicator of trustworthiness, it other words "how likely is the link to be spam?" not as some hard blockade against traversal. It's fairly easy to setup a webpage linked only from nofollow sources and see it quickly pick up a prominent position on google, if it contains suitably rare search terms and was linked from reasonably well placed webpages. Might it rank better if it was not nofollow? Perhaps.
As a signal to send to search engines "nofollow" is the right one for most links added to our projects: While most article text receives a reasonable amount of oversight, it strongly appears (and my own testing has demonstrated) that experienced Wikipedians simply do not follow external links that frequently (why would they? They take them away from their business on Wikipedia. As such, the external links are of lower quality. We indicate this to the search engines. Life is good.
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I know this is off topic but I thought it might be just the thing for some body on the list. I have nothing in this.
Doug