[WikiEN-l] SEOs on doing stupid Wikipedia tricks (for the bored)

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/19/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19/08/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> >     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSi60Zj6JXU
> >
> > Some idiot, somewhere, is going to think this is a good idea.
>
> Does that even work? Surely Google isn't stupid enough to give
> internal links a significant weight? Wikipedia ranks highly because
> whenever someone mentions a new topic they almost always give a link
> to the appropriate Wikipedia page for people to find out more about
> it. I very much doubt internal links have much to do with it.

Yes it works. It's part of why I argued that we should no-follow all
internal links into or out of user namespace, and possibly go as far
as fully noindexing that entire namespace.   See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29&diff=prev&oldid=149383253

Certainly the problems also exist outside of user NS, the fact that we
execute even less editorial control over userpages is why I was
singling them out.