[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

Mon May 1 15:47:02 UTC 2006

On 5/1/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> 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.

I did a quick sample of some mirrors. 2 out of 10 used nofollow. 5 out
of 10, however, used some method of link obfuscation (such as using a
JavaScript that gets the URL in reverse spelling as a parameter) or
even link stripping. So it appears that at least some mirrors are
actively trying to _prevent_ links to external sites from being
indexed, probably as some method of SEO.

Erik