On 18 November 2013 17:46, Nathan Larson nathanlarson3141@gmail.com wrote:
If Google agrees, they can stop giving wikis in general, or certain wikis, such influence over pagerank. The spammers have market incentives to become more sophisticated, but so does Google, since their earnings depend on keeping their search results relevant and useful, so that people don't switch to competitors that do a better job.
Market forces are not our friend. Google's incentive is to *ignore* spammy links, not to stop them existing; spammers' incentive is to get their links wherever they possibly can, and particularly in the places where they're effective, not to avoid putting links where they're not effective. Pure market forces would leave wikis (large and small) attacked by progressively more sophisticated spam, search engines being progressively smarter about ignoring the spam, and wikis *still being served with as much spam as before* (and it being progressively harder to identify and remove).
Wikis can only participate in the arms race by exposing publicly the *extent* to which spamming is pointless. Google publicising the fact that nofollow is ignored (and hence spamming is pointful) is actually a really unhelpful thing for them to do. If they really have taken the nofollow weapon away from wikis altogether, then we need to find a way to get it back.
--HM