On 25/05/2011 15:23, Ian Woollard wrote:
On 25/05/2011, Andreas Kolbejayen466@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