On 5/1/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/1/06, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
How does turning on nofollow punish anyone? Nobody is entitled to free pagerank just because they've been listed on Wikipedia.
I see two possibilities:
- Wikipedia specifically has a very high influence on a site's
ranking. In this case, turning off nofollow will alter the shape of the web in search engines which respect it. If the average quality of links in Wikipedia is higher than the average quality of links outside Wikipedia, the quality of these search engine results as a whole will deteriorate. This is not about entitlement, it is about using the influence we have responsibly.
OR
- Due to mirrors, enabling or disabling nofollow has hardly any
visible effect on search engine rankings. In that case, it would be a placebo effect.
As I said, I think timing the addition of external links and enabling nofollow only for recent additions might be a reasonable compromise.
None of Wikipedia's mirrors has anywhere near the pagerank weight that Wikipedia itself has. With the exception of a small number of already high-prominence sites, Wikipedia linkage is almost certainly bound to substantially alter the rank of a given page in search engine results.
We are writing an encyclopedia, not seeking to influence search engine result quality. It should not be a serious concern of ours whether our actions have a positive or negative impact on the value of Google's product; at the very least, we should not eschew making the a decision which is correct for us because that choice might have a detrimental effect on the quality of Google's product. Since leaving nofollow off encourages SEO spamming, and turning it on discourages SEO spamming, I see no reason why we should not disable SEO spamming.
The "delay" mechanism not only requires additional technical complexity but just encourages gaming by SEO people. Just turn it off.
Kelly