Wikipedia Links No longer passing pagerank
Loading ...Thanks to Max for an interesting article: Wikipedia Links No longer passing pagerank
All Wikipedia links are no follow
Basically, “nofollow” is a non-traditional HTML value or code used in search engines that disables hyperlinks from influences the link target’s ranking in the earch engine’s index. This would cause a reduction in spam in search engines and would prevent “spamdexing” from taking place.
Spamdexing, which would be a popular term in Wikipedia (but even more popular in the 90’s) before nofollow, involves repeating phrases which are unrelated to manipulate the relevancy of resources indexed by a search engine. Most of us may have encountered a form of spamdexing sometime in our internet browsing history.
Examples
“Link farms
Involves creating tightly-knit communities of pages referencing each other, also known humorously as mutual admiration societies
Hidden links
Putting links where visitors will not see them in order to increase link popularity. Highlighted link text can help rank a webpage higher for matching that phrase.
“Sybil attack”
This is the forging of multiple identities for malicious intent, named after the famous multiple personality disorder patient “Sybil” (Shirley Ardell Mason). A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs known as spam blogs.
Spam blogs
Also known as splogs, a spam blog, is complete fake blog created exclusively with the intent of spamming. They are similar in nature to link farms.
Page Hijacking
This is achieved by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites.
Buying expired domains
Some link spammers monitor DNS records for domains that will expire soon, then buy them when they expire and replace the pages with links to their pages. See Domaining. However Google resets the link data on expired domains.”
(I don’t see the quote tool available for some reason, but the above was a quote from Wikipedia for the sake of quick definitions/examples)
In Wikipedia’s instance, a new term was coined called “Wiki Spam” (I know, right?), which unsurprisingly means anyone could place links from the wiki site to the spam site. Like the way a spam email might have in your subject line “Free penis enlarger click here” only to deceivingly upload a program that gives you many friendly pop-ups every 2-3 seconds, the site is totally unrelated to the page on the wiki where the link is added.
This is when Wikipedia implented the nofollow value. The Links with this attribute are ignored by Google’s PageRank algorithm. And with the help of Wiki admins, nofollow values can be used to discourage wiki spam.
In a nutshell, if you want to put a link in Wikipedia in hopes that a bunch people will click it and your page will be higher on the ranks by google, yahoo, etc… fat chance because you just got “pwned”.
However, there is criticism around the wiki world (and youtube) that nofollow does little to help the fight against spam.
Here’s a couple of “controversial” videos on anti-nofollow, more specifically to bloggers… (1st one defends it saying it will make the internet more democratic)
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