[WikiEN-l] Nofollow back on URL links on en.wikipedia.org articles for now

[Anthony]

On 1/20/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of
> > a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting
> > WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in
> > en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
> >
> > (Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be
> > super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into
> > MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)
>
> This is a real shame since good external links help to vastly improve
> search :( Oh well, cost of doing business I guess.
>
The search engines are always free to ignore the "nofollow" tag, if
they think that the external links are an overall positive on search
results.  Apparently they don't.

Anthony