On 11/18/2013 01:59 PM, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
On 11/18/2013 12:27 PM, Risker wrote:
To be honest, I suspect if the Google fellow said anything like this, it was that they might ignore nofollow on Wikimedia wikis, but I'm pretty certain that he didn't say Mediawiki wikis.
I remember being surprised too that it applied to all MediaWiki installations rather than just Wikimedia sites. I have pinged him about it.
I now received an answer from my contact at Google:
Google will not follow rel=nofollow links, and not flow pagerank through them. That includes Wiki{m,p}edia sources.
So the information I got at Wikimania was either not correct or the result of a misunderstanding on my part. Another possibility is that this detail of how pagerank works is considered too sensitive for publication.
It should not be too hard to verify this independently by setting up a fresh page with an unguessable URL and linking it from a wiki page with rel=nofollow. If googlebot visits that page (or it turns up in search results), then rel=nofollow was ignored.
Gabriel