[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell at gmail.com
Mon May 1 14:38:06 UTC 2006


On 5/1/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/1/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I don't much like the idea of effectively punishing thousands of
> > perfectly fine sites because of a few people who pee in the proverbial
> > public pool.
>
> How does turning on nofollow punish anyone?  Nobody is entitled to
> free pagerank just because they've been listed on Wikipedia.
>
> I see no good reason not to turn on nofollow for en.  I also note that
> de has been nofollow for quite a while now.

I'm with Kelly on this one.

It seems to me that if a sites pagerank is dramatically impacted by
their addition to wikipedia, then the addition of that link to
Wikipedia is to some extent a form of original research. Wikipedia
does not exist to improve the popularity of other websites.

We also must consider the social impact:  The knowledge that being
linked from Wikipedia so dramatically impacts google results causes
users to distrust the motivations of people who have added a link more
than they would otherwise. It's poisonous.

Erik's concept a time delay isn't a new idea... it's one that has
already been disregarded, at least for this application: even if we
ignore the technical fun of using external links table at realtime,
we're still left with the fact that it's pointless.  For links that
are removed in a short span of time the SEO gains no advantage
(mirrors haven't had a chance to mirror, google hasn't had a chance to
spider), our concern stems from links which remain due to a lack of
editorial oversight.

Furthermore, On several Wiki's I'm involved with no follow has been a
godsend, dramatically cutting spam in a short span of time.

I don't think that no follow will solve all problems, but it's a
start. If it reduces external link spamming by 10%, then it will have
made an improvement larger than is possible with any other simple
method.

There are many technical measures which can and will be applied, but I
don't see them as solving the root problem... because the root problem
is editorial, it's social, it's not easy, and it's not something that
the computers can wave away for us.



More information about the foundation-l mailing list