[Commons-l] [Internal-l] 100k image donation to Wikimedia Commons

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 10:29 AM, peter green <plugwash at p10link.net> wrote:
>
>> But you cannot exclude that you are higher in search engines cause of
>> links from Wikipedia articles and images ;)
>>
> Doesn't wikipedia screw over the sites it reffers to theese days by
> using nofollow?

Screw over? Hardly.  We're not all playing some game of who can get
the highest on the search results. I understand some people are, fine,
but thats not what we're doing.

Moreover, "nofollow" is poorly named and the poor naming results in
substantial misunderstanding.   The way modern search engines utilize
nofollow is primarly as an indicator of trustworthiness, it other
words "how likely is the link to be spam?" not as some hard blockade
against traversal.  It's fairly easy to setup a webpage linked only
from nofollow sources and see it quickly pick up a prominent position
on google, if it contains suitably rare search terms and was linked
from reasonably well placed webpages.  Might it rank better if it was
not nofollow? Perhaps.

As a signal to send to search engines "nofollow" is the right one for
most links added to our projects:  While most article text receives a
reasonable amount of oversight, it strongly appears (and my own
testing has demonstrated) that experienced Wikipedians simply do not
follow external links that frequently (why would they? They take them
away from their business on Wikipedia. As such, the external links are
of lower quality. We indicate this to the search engines. Life is
good.