[Foundation-l] Interwiki map criteria and nofollow

[Delirium]

Anthony wrote:
> On 5/2/07, Rich Holton <richholton at 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.

-Mark