On 5/1/06, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/1/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
I don't much like the idea of effectively punishing thousands of perfectly fine sites because of a few people who pee in the proverbial public pool.
How does turning on nofollow punish anyone? Nobody is entitled to free pagerank just because they've been listed on Wikipedia.
I see no good reason not to turn on nofollow for en. I also note that de has been nofollow for quite a while now.
I'm with Kelly on this one.
It seems to me that if a sites pagerank is dramatically impacted by their addition to wikipedia, then the addition of that link to Wikipedia is to some extent a form of original research. Wikipedia does not exist to improve the popularity of other websites.
We also must consider the social impact: The knowledge that being linked from Wikipedia so dramatically impacts google results causes users to distrust the motivations of people who have added a link more than they would otherwise. It's poisonous.
Erik's concept a time delay isn't a new idea... it's one that has already been disregarded, at least for this application: even if we ignore the technical fun of using external links table at realtime, we're still left with the fact that it's pointless. For links that are removed in a short span of time the SEO gains no advantage (mirrors haven't had a chance to mirror, google hasn't had a chance to spider), our concern stems from links which remain due to a lack of editorial oversight.
Furthermore, On several Wiki's I'm involved with no follow has been a godsend, dramatically cutting spam in a short span of time.
I don't think that no follow will solve all problems, but it's a start. If it reduces external link spamming by 10%, then it will have made an improvement larger than is possible with any other simple method.
There are many technical measures which can and will be applied, but I don't see them as solving the root problem... because the root problem is editorial, it's social, it's not easy, and it's not something that the computers can wave away for us.