On 2013-11-18 2:19 PM, "Gabriel Wicke" gwicke@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 11/18/2013 10:11 AM, Nathan Larson wrote:
Do we have any way of knowing that Yong-Gang Wang of Google is correct about this? I sent a message to this individual<https://plus.google.com/105349418663822362024/about
(hopefully
it's the same guy) asking for more information. It seems like a pretty major departure from past Google policy/practice.
I think it is highly likely that he is correct about this. Professional spammers will likely monitor the effect of their campaigns closely, so would know about this first. I would expect less wiki spam if rel=nofollow was actually honored. Especially hidden (unclickable) links don't have much value apart from page rank.
Gabriel
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
That certainly sounds logical for wikipedia and friends. However it sounds kind of odd for mediawiki in general. There exists many unmaintained mw installs just collecting spam.
It would also be interesting to know if other search engines do something similar.
-bawolff