Sorry if this is slightly off topic but people on this list are most likely to know the answer.

It would help a lot fundraising for the Wikimedia foundation if google threw some searches like "educational charity", "endow education" or "donate now" onto the WMF site. I know from my day job there are tens of millions of dollars of donations just being guided by google main search results. But google doesn't put wmf high up, and AFAICT is doing something odd, examples:

1) en has a site wide link to "privacy policy" on the wikimedia foundation site but google even prefers the actual article on privacy policy (a crappy stub) on en in its search results. This article has a much smaller number of inlinks from a subset of the pages, and official links from another website should be more influential than internal links. This comparison is still true if you do "allinanchor" on google too so it isn't a page content issue.

2) With firefox "google toolbar" I can see that every internal sitewide link on en has a page rank of at least 8 but the WMF ones are 6 or 7, even though they have links from all the other projects as well. This has been the case for ages even when page ranks all around the place have changed.

My theory: The links to WMF are not marked "nofollow" by wikipedia but google has done some sort of manual nofollow on them because they do not like (and have said they don't like) the fact wikipedia blanket nofollows and does not differentiate good and back links. Ok, its a theory and another reason (yawn) for implementing a greenlist as was proposed 18 months ago (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BozMo/greenlist). Alternatively, WP should change the links to an internal link and do the jump out using a permanent divert which will probably fix it if we only need to do it for the WMF pages and don't care about wikia etc.

Other theories: ? I would be very interested to know.

BozMo