On 5/1/06, Arne Klempert klempert@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/1/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
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?
-- Arne (akl)
That's an utterly misleading line of thought. If everyone in the world added nofollow to their links tomorrow, nothing terribly drastic would happen to the web. Maybe some search engines would break for a day or two. In the longer term, everyone turning on nofollow would be equivalent to everyone turning it off. The web got along just fine before nofollow was invented.
Google invented nofollow to provide them with additonal information about certain types of links. Apparently they'd prefer Wikipedia to employ it (which would also imply they don't think it's going to "sabotage the web"). There doesn't seem to be any suggestion that turning it on would hurt the encyclopedia, and some are suggesting it would help the encyclopedia.
Anthony