[WikiEN-l] Flickr tells the SEOs to go away too

[Ian Woollard]

On 27/02/2008, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why even bother? I mean yes, there are a handful of sites which we
>  consider useful and reliable enough to link to them in a very high
>  volume, so high that removing "nofollow" would create a conspicuous
>  spike in the job queue, so high that we've created templates to make
>  them easier to link to. IMDB comes to mind, but somehow I doubt they
>  would be bothered enough to care whether links from Wikipedia affect
>  IMDB's page-rank or whether this would help IMDB pass "Photobucket" in
>  the top 20. But whether they care or not, why should we?

Because it may make a huge difference to those sites, and we want them
to hang around, or we wouldn't link them. If we link to a site they
can end up above or close to the wikipedia on the google ranking, and
so they would get direct traffic from google searches. So we'd be
gardening good sites that contain things that we can't for copyright
or other reasons. They grow and we water them, and they can advertise
and recoup their bandwidth costs and so forth and then they tend to
stick around longer. Right now we're leeches. We link to them and they
may get traffic from us, but none of that shows up in the google
ranking. So they've got less incentive to hang around.

>  —C.W.

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.