On 5/1/06, Arne Klempert klempert@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/1/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/1/06, Arne Klempert klempert@gmail.com wrote:
If you take a look back in history, Wikipedia benefited (and still benefits) extremely from links and their impact on our PageRank. So it might be a little bit unfair to add nofollow tags to *all* of our links, just because it seems to be a simple solution to one of our many problems. The world wide web is not a one-way street ;)
No one is proposing all our externals be nofollowed. Only ones submitted by users.
Hairsplitting? Okay, then let's say "almost all".
A little, but not really... You talk about Wikipedia benefiting from links, but most of the places places who link to us have linked to us because the site operator has deemed Wikipedia to be useful.
This isn't the same as our links.
But really, what is the goal of Wikipedia? It is to make a free content encyclopedia. It is not to be most popular website, or even the most read encyclopedia. It's not to help SEOs or search engines...
Let's try it the other way around. Links (real ones, without nofollow) are essential for the WWW. Does it comply with our goals to sabotage the web, only because we're too lazy?
Oh, are you part of the misinformed who participated in the prior vote on this thinking that setting no follow makes links useless?
In any case, sabotage is a very strong word. Can you provide evidence that doing so would sabotage the web? Or is this just random conjecture? I think that nofollowing on Wikipedia will actually improve search results, but I can't support that with concrete evidence. What I can say with confidence and back with evidence is that nofollow will reduce the incentive to spam, it will mostly eliminate some sources of spam, that it with not impact the search rankings of already popular sites, and that it will reduce distrust on enwiki to some extent.