[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

Mon May 1 14:38:06 UTC 2006

On 5/1/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/1/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I don't much like the idea of effectively punishing thousands of
> > perfectly fine sites because of a few people who pee in the proverbial
> > public pool.
>
> How does turning on nofollow punish anyone?  Nobody is entitled to
> free pagerank just because they've been listed on Wikipedia.
>
> I see no good reason not to turn on nofollow for en.  I also note that
> de has been nofollow for quite a while now.

I'm with Kelly on this one.

It seems to me that if a sites pagerank is dramatically impacted by
their addition to wikipedia, then the addition of that link to
Wikipedia is to some extent a form of original research. Wikipedia
does not exist to improve the popularity of other websites.

We also must consider the social impact:  The knowledge that being
linked from Wikipedia so dramatically impacts google results causes
users to distrust the motivations of people who have added a link more
than they would otherwise. It's poisonous.

Erik's concept a time delay isn't a new idea... it's one that has
already been disregarded, at least for this application: even if we
ignore the technical fun of using external links table at realtime,
we're still left with the fact that it's pointless.  For links that
are removed in a short span of time the SEO gains no advantage
(mirrors haven't had a chance to mirror, google hasn't had a chance to
spider), our concern stems from links which remain due to a lack of
editorial oversight.

Furthermore, On several Wiki's I'm involved with no follow has been a
godsend, dramatically cutting spam in a short span of time.

I don't think that no follow will solve all problems, but it's a
start. If it reduces external link spamming by 10%, then it will have
made an improvement larger than is possible with any other simple
method.

There are many technical measures which can and will be applied, but I
don't see them as solving the root problem... because the root problem
is editorial, it's social, it's not easy, and it's not something that
the computers can wave away for us.