On 27/02/2008, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
Why even bother? I mean yes, there are a handful of sites which we consider useful and reliable enough to link to them in a very high volume, so high that removing "nofollow" would create a conspicuous spike in the job queue, so high that we've created templates to make them easier to link to. IMDB comes to mind, but somehow I doubt they would be bothered enough to care whether links from Wikipedia affect IMDB's page-rank or whether this would help IMDB pass "Photobucket" in the top 20. But whether they care or not, why should we?
Because it may make a huge difference to those sites, and we want them to hang around, or we wouldn't link them. If we link to a site they can end up above or close to the wikipedia on the google ranking, and so they would get direct traffic from google searches. So we'd be gardening good sites that contain things that we can't for copyright or other reasons. They grow and we water them, and they can advertise and recoup their bandwidth costs and so forth and then they tend to stick around longer. Right now we're leeches. We link to them and they may get traffic from us, but none of that shows up in the google ranking. So they've got less incentive to hang around.
—C.W.