[WikiEN-l] Just what *is* Jimbo's role anyway? - "nofollow" decision

[geni]

On 3/22/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22/03/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:
>
> > Okay, that makes some sense.
> > Now, why the hell aren't they nofollowed along with everything else?
>
>
> Presumably because they're very unlikely to be spam links that search
> engine spammers would insert to try to get Google rank.
>
> (And now let's see if search engine spammers start looking for ways to
> abuse that ...)

trivial it doesn't nofollow links to del.icio.us. Spammers have been
abuseing that for some time:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=del.icio.us+seo&btnG=Search+Blogs

Google Groups probaly have simular issues

>
> Personally I think it's in fact good to give Google rank to external
> links if doing so doesn't constitute an attractive nuisance to
> spammers. That links on Wikipedia are editor-selected is a reason the
> en:wp community objected to default nofollow when it was first added
> to Mediawiki. What we need is some way to make it less binary. That
> means coding. Which I can't do either. Pfeh!


Wikipedia is not DOMZ. I don't think we should be in the game of
helping google and other search engins decide what counts as a good
link. By all means make sure they pic up links  to other wikimedia
projects but I see little value is messing around with methods to rate
other types of links.

-- 
geni