--- On Wed, 25/5/11, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Wednesday, 25 May, 2011, 7:53
On 23/05/2011, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Google's search results are entirely their
business.
Actually not entirely, we do have quite a bit of control.
In an absolute worse case we could noindex the entire
article (I'm not
suggesting it, in fact I strongly recommend against it).
But google pay attention to how many articles link to it,
and there's
an enormous 'political neologism' template at the end of
the article,
which makes them all mutually link.
I can't estimate how much link juice that pushes into the
article, but
it may well be substantial, there's probably relatively few
Wikipedia
articles that link to the term otherwise, terms don't
usually get that
many links, but I don't know how many external links in
there are, or
how much link juice they supply.
There is probably a reasonably strong argument for
nofollowing
internal 'link farms' like that, I don't see that one term
should
inherit another's link juice, but I couldn't see any
obvious way to
nofollow internal links when I checked briefly.
Okay, now we are getting somewhere. There are actually three templates at
the bottom of the article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Dan_Savage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Political_neologisms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Sexual_slang
The sexual slang one in particular is massive, listing more than 100
terms.
These templates are all new creations by Cirt, the Santorum article's main
author. They were created between 10 and 15 May, shortly after Santorum
announced he might run for President, and then added to all the other
articles listed in the templates, thus creating a couple of hundred incoming
links, and enhancing the article's Google ranking.
Now, *that's using Wikipedia for political campaigning.*
By the way, Cirt's GA articles include this highly flattering portrait of
a gay porn company:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Fisher
Andreas