[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

Mon May 1 15:30:00 UTC 2006

Erik Moeller wrote:
> 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.

I can't agree here.

1) Mirrors running MediaWiki on a database dump already get rel="nofollow" by
default unless they explicitly switched it off.

2) Screen-scrapers would be getting rel="nofollow" in their copies too --
something they currently DO NOT GET, thus multiplying the effect of linkspam.

While it's hypothetically possible for them to strip it, why would they bother?
It makes no difference to them, they just want text content to bring search
engine users to *their* ads and links.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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