[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Erik Moeller]

On 5/1/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:

> How does turning on nofollow punish anyone?  Nobody is entitled to
> free pagerank just because they've been listed on Wikipedia.

I see two possibilities:

1) Wikipedia specifically has a very high influence on a site's
ranking. In this case, turning off nofollow will alter the shape of
the web in search engines which respect it. If the average quality of
links in Wikipedia is higher than the average quality of links outside
Wikipedia, the quality of these search engine results as a whole will
deteriorate. This is not about entitlement, it is about using the
influence we have responsibly.

OR

2) Due to mirrors, enabling or disabling nofollow has hardly any
visible effect on search engine rankings. In that case, it would be a
placebo effect.

As I said, I think timing the addition of external links and enabling
nofollow only for recent additions might be a reasonable compromise.

Erik