Anthony wrote:
On 5/2/07, Rich Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
As an aside: Given the volume of complaining that the nofollow policy has generated from the SEO community, the so-called "link juice" from Wikipedia must be valuable. Have we considered the possibility of this as a revenue stream?
I thought about that, and I came to the conclusion that if Wikimedia derived any significant revenue from such a thing the search engines wouldn't like it. As such they'd probably find a way to either take away the benefit from the links or else lower the rank of Wikipedia itself.
I'd be surprised if they don't already special-case Wikipedia, nofollow or not. Nofollow is merely advisory, and a search engine is free to completely ignore it, if they feel ignoring it, or treating it in some other unspecified manner, would improve their search results.
-Mark