[WikiEN-l] SEO conference on Wikipedia

[John Lee]

On 4/18/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 18/04/07, Info Control <infodmz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Related question: was the nofollow change for all links with search
> engines
> > permanent?
>
>
> Brion says he will happily put in something finer-grained when someone
> writes code to that effect.
>
>
> (whenever this is pointed out to those objecting, there usually
> follows silence and the occasional tumbleweed - it seems complaining
> is easier than programming.)


It's crazily difficult to program this thing. Those who advocate, say, not
nofollow-ing links older than X amount of time, probably don't realise how
immensely difficult this would be. You would have to first isolate all
external links (no easy task, but fortunately I think we have one standard
format for external links), and then go back through all the revisions in
the history up to a certain point, and make sure each revision contained
this link (not as easy as it sounds). As a programmer, I would not want to
take this task on.

Johnleemk