On 5/1/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
- Mirrors running MediaWiki on a database dump already get rel="nofollow" by
default unless they explicitly switched it off.
- Screen-scrapers would be getting rel="nofollow" in their copies too --
something they currently DO NOT GET, thus multiplying the effect of linkspam.
I did a quick sample of some mirrors. 2 out of 10 used nofollow. 5 out of 10, however, used some method of link obfuscation (such as using a JavaScript that gets the URL in reverse spelling as a parameter) or even link stripping. So it appears that at least some mirrors are actively trying to _prevent_ links to external sites from being indexed, probably as some method of SEO.
Erik