On 25/05/2011 15:23, Ian Woollard wrote:
On 25/05/2011, Andreas Kolbe<jayen466(a)yahoo.com>
wrote:
Okay, now we are getting somewhere.
These templates are all new creations by Cirt, the Santorum article's main
author. They were created between 10 and 15 May, shortly after Santorum
announced he might run for President, and then added to all the other
articles listed in the templates, thus creating a couple of hundred incoming
links, and enhancing the article's Google ranking.
Now, *that's using Wikipedia for political campaigning.*
To be fair, we
don't actually know it's having any effect at all, and
it could be *lowering* the ranking for the article by sending its
juice off to other articles around, averaging and diluting it down.
My point was only that we probably shouldn't be doing anything, even
accidentally, that would be likely to change its link juice over what
it naturally gets. If it's fairly naturally at the top of the google
listings, and we haven't done anything odd, then that's perfectly
fine.
As I said earlier in the thread, COI is possibly relevant here. Also the
issue of whether a template should contain a certain linked entry, or
not, is a legitimate discussion. "Slang" doesn't usually mean "words
somebody thinks ought to be slang", but actual street language.
The alleged SEO is, I still think, primarily the problem of those
running search engines. I can see that its discussion is a bit more
complex than that if you include: giving a stick to those who want one
to beat WP with; and alerting Google (and others) to the way our link
"agriculture" might have artificial elements.
Charles