On 5/2/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On 5/2/07, Rich Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
As an aside: Given the volume of complaining that the nofollow policy has generated from the SEO community, the so-called "link juice" from Wikipedia must be valuable. Have we considered the possibility of this as a revenue stream?
I thought about that, and I came to the conclusion that if Wikimedia derived any significant revenue from such a thing the search engines wouldn't like it. As such they'd probably find a way to either take away the benefit from the links or else lower the rank of Wikipedia itself.
I'd be surprised if they don't already special-case Wikipedia, nofollow or not. Nofollow is merely advisory, and a search engine is free to completely ignore it, if they feel ignoring it, or treating it in some other unspecified manner, would improve their search results.
I'd be very surprised if they already special-case Wikipedia, as they've said before that they don't do that sort of thing, and it's much cleaner from a design standpoint to not fill up code with special-cases. They also allegedly asked Jimbo to turn nofollow on, which would imply that such a move had an actual effect.
It would make a lot more sense if Google just found a way to detect sites like Wikipedia that were likely to contain user-submitted content, and apply an algorithm intelligent enough to separate the wheat from the chaff (using the length of time the link appeared in the text, for instance). But if they did that, why bother Jimbo about whether or not Wikipedia has enabled nofollow?
Anthony