On 8/19/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Does that even work? Surely Google isn't stupid enough to give internal links a significant weight? Wikipedia ranks highly because whenever someone mentions a new topic they almost always give a link to the appropriate Wikipedia page for people to find out more about it. I very much doubt internal links have much to do with it.
I wondered this too, so I did a little unscientific experiment: click Random Article till you find an article with a positive PageRank and put it into google and see what links to it. If it's only wikipedia pages, then yes, internal links do matter.
After a few articles, I found [[Tonga Plate]] ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga_Plate ) with a PageRank of 4 (not good, but not terribly bad either) and put it into google to see what linked to it: http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FTo...
Three pages, all wikipedia pages (with PageRanks 5, 6 and 6). I'm by no means an expert on google algorithms, but the fact that [[Tonga Plate]] got a PageRank of 4 using just three links tells me that the weight of the ranking is probably the same whether or not the links are internal or external. Just my guess.
--Oskar