[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Jan Kulveit]

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 04:40:23PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> 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.
> 

The quality of Wikipedia should be given more weight than to task
of  responsibly influencing search engines. If turning nofollow on leads 
to decrease of spammers effort, it would be good for Wikipedia quality.

> 
> 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.
>

Most highly ranking mirrors are used for SEO spam and turn external
links off completely (except their own links).
 
> As I said, I think timing the addition of external links and enabling
> nofollow only for recent additions might be a reasonable compromise.
> 

I don't think so. Trying to think like the enemy... What I would
do if I wanted to insert spam link to e.g. Prague (I remove spam
from that page frequently).

1. spam on the Prague page wouldnt not survive long enough, too many 
people watch it... thats futile
2. its necessary to insert the link to less visible pages, preferably
watched by nobody. what about Prague districts, Prague public transport
3. still, there is the risk of RC patrol. solution? spam indirectly e.g., 
create "useful" and "noncommercial" pages which won't be removed by RC 
patrollers on sight (what about list of useful telephone numbers... 
yet another weather service... seen in practice )
4. link from such lower-profile pages would be less effective because 
lower keyword density & lower inter-Wikipedia page rank
5. so... let's do some inter-wiki SEO, create wikilinks so the spammed 
wiki pages get higher interwiki rank, optimize the text for keywords...

results:
-> spam will be on pages with little editorial review
-> masked as noncommercial / informative pages
-> editing with malicious agenda of influencing interlink
structure

Jan Kulveit - User:Wikimol