-
Website
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/ -
Original page
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/01/campaign-to-reduce-wikipedias-pagerank-to-zero.html -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
(in case you're feeling offended by this comment, please realize it's tongue-in-cheek)
They have very good reasons for doing it. They think they are serving the goals of their ambitious project by making it less appealing to marketers. While I wouldn't mind some link love from WP, I don't blame them a bit.
"In my ideal world, Wikipedia would add nofollow to their untrusted links, but work out ways to allow trusted links to remove the nofollow attribute."
DarkMatter, I don't expect my response to achieve anything other than highlighting the childish action by Wikipedia. They effectively decided they didn't like some of the kids, so kicked them all out of the play pen. Well, if every kid stopped playing with Wikipedia, they wouldn't have to worry about sharing their toys in the first place. The phrase "biting the hand that feeds" springs to mind. :-)
Honestly, my campaign is really just highlighting how silly Wikipedia's knee-jerk reaction was in the first place.
I do think Wikipedia has gone overboard but not many websites are in the same situation with thousands of pages of new content submitted every day, even if the work is distributed there must be a lot of poor quality/spam content to trawl through. I guess Wikipedia thinks its "brand" is strong enough that people will use it as a standalone search for specifics, or maybe they're just relying on the fact that most people will be too lazy/not know about nofollows so they'll keep all that link juice to themselves?
There are loads of options they could do, such as voting whether links are relevant/spammy, introducing some kind of Google-esque sandbox/waiting period for new links. I blogged about this several months ago, what would happen if hundreds of major websites start nofollowing links, it does kind of put a dent in how some search engines work. The big brands, using other sites to boost themselves up, then essentially cutting off the hands (links) that raised them to this position.
After that rant, I'll always be nofollowing my Wiki links, just out of principle 'cos I'm mean!
Of course I realize that link-dependent SEOs want Wikipedia to let them abuse it again, but this should be a lesson to people who refuse to learn how to do proper search engine optimization.
Wikipedia only took this action because of invasive link dropping, which is abusive. I fully applaud the decision and hope they never turn off the NoFollows.
Hopefully it will at least get the Wikipedia team thinking.
I am surprised Matt Cutts supported the move. :-(
Well, he personally asked me to enable nofollow last year, so I'm not too surprised. :)
"I think Andy is more upset at their resolution to just add nofollow tags to all of their links. It seems like they wanted a quick fix, and didn’t want to take the time to implement a process to reduce spam and to allow trusted links."
Yep! It's a quick fix until better tools are ready. I said as much in my announcement and requested that parties interested in helping with that get involved.
(Note that the majority of our sites have had nofollow on for a couple of years. Only portions of the English-language Wikipedia have had it off; but while it gets the most attention from watchers it's also the most attractive for spammers.)
Explain to us again why it's a bad thing for Wikipedia not to give free Google rankings to any random spammer who cares to add a link, but a good thing for your blog to do exactly the same thing?
I would love to do a follow-up story on you and the campaign you are starting. If interested, contact me- you know where to find me.
Rose Hunt
Why not just get rid of external links altogether? You're abusing the nofollow tag. It's supposed to be used when you link to a source that cannot be trusted or vouched for. By adding to every external link, what does that say about the trust we can place in Wikipedia? If Wikipedia is built on external information and you've just disowned all external links, where does that leave us?
Of course, as I've already said, and you've ignored, we would like to see a more fine-grained approach in the future which takes into account human review.
I guess it's easier to be indignant over a misunderstanding and play a childish publicity stunt, though. (Probably more fun, too!)
Why not follow Matt Cutts advice?
"If an off-domain link is made by an anonymous or unauthenticated user, I’d use nofollow on that link. Once a user has done a certain number of posts/edits, or has been around for long enough to build up trust, then those nofollows could be removed and the links could be trusted. Anytime you have a user that you’d trust, there’s no need to use nofollow links."
There has to be a better solution. I'm glad you've stopped by to share your side of the story - I truly do appreciate it. If this publicity stunt has helped speed up the process for a better solution, that's all I could have hoped for. Unless you really were worried your PageRank would reduce to zero. ;-)
WikiPedia has trust. It's built it up over time. I fully agree with allowing trusted users give trusted nofollow links.
Enjoy!
...which is the same as...
"Use the source and don't give credit back".
This is so much against the philosophy of the web, I struggle to believe Matt would have said that.
Aren't search engines work because the algorithms they use imitate the rules of the society? Or do you mean to say Wikipedia is above this "noise"?
You are leaving out an important difference: The links to Wikipedia were created by those "lowly webmasters" based on Wikipedia's merit; and most of the external links added to Wikipedia are motivated by personal gain.
"so an extra month or two to figure out a practical solution, would not have hurt."
That's easy for you to say Andy. Why don't you actually think up a solution and help code it into Wikipedia instead of waging this silly little anti-Wikipedia campaign of yours?
Here's an idea: Use PeopleRank. Each Wikipedia member can recommend X number of members as members they trust. The amount of PeopleRank passed on depends on the recommendation he/she has gotten from other members. Links added or approved by members with PeopleRank >= X are nofollow-free.
I thought WP was found to be *more accurate* than Britannica after a study? WP is pretty well vetted too!
Wikipedia uses nofollow to remove the incentive for spammers, but Google can quite easily just choose to ignore the nofollow attribute on Wikipedia without telling anyone (well except Jimbo). Everyone wins!
Page rank is only one of the things that go into Google's "secret sauce." If all the sites that are part of the commercial/SEO/spam network stopped linking to Wikipedia, Wikipedia articles would still get high ranks because of their actual content, and because there would still be links to Wikipedia from plenty of noncommercial sources.
Does anyone feel that the more NOFOLLOW gets used, the less effective it will become? Just like any other method a search engine uses to determine ranking, eventually it gets abused to the point of it being devalued... ex: meta tags, subdomains, link farms, etc… Furthermore the easier these things are to use, the more abused they become. NOFOLLOW will eventually end up in the SEO boneyard and this will all be a moot point.
BTW - according to the Wikipedia, these things happened today in history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_24
= )
I asked, you didn't answer, so I went ahead with what I had. Hope you don't mind. It is on the front page of Associated Content after all.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/132418...
BTW, I love your spam protection. I wish everyone used it. I hate trying to read scrambled letters mixed in with chaotic lines.
Good job
You did get a lot of backlinks with no "additional" tags:)
I don't see ANY problem with Wiki nofollows. Sure, I work with Wiki. But I'm getting traffic, no PR.
By the way, why everybody's dreaming about PR???
As for me, Wiki's rankings are great due to trust, no backlinks.
You need to work hard, if you're going to keep interest for campaign:)
P.S. Sorry for poor English.
I'm in!
Doug
http://whatjapanthinks.com/wikipedia-nofollow/
Or wait? Are you offering to write the code that carefully discerns which links to use nofollow on? Don't forget that to run on one of the world's highest-volume web sites, your code will have to be carefully performance tested. Post a link here, and I'm sure you can get it critiqued.
No? Hmmm... Then where do you feel you get the moral authority to boss around a bunch of volunteers whom you apparently haven't done anything to aid? Really, I'm all ears. Next maybe you can post a YouTube video of you sitting in an armchair while criticizing people people picking up litter for not doing it the way you want.
Better yet, we can ask Google to simply ignore ALL inbound links to Wikipedia and it will lose it's value.
Wikipedia become popular and useful, because the community linked to it and vouched for its credibility. Not linking back (and passing PR) to that same community is hypocritical.
The criticizing people people picking up litter for not doing it the way you want analogy was pretty apt, on the other hand.
Listen, I'm all for getting rid of the spam. But if an editor/volunteer ads a legitimate external source, it should pass on the PR value. If it's a crap link, it should be removed.
Heck, if you just said that an external source link had a nofollow attribute for the first 30 days, then automatically has that attribute removed after 30 days, surely that would be enough time for the Wikipedia to weed out the spam links and disuade those spammers looking to add links in order to win a silly SEO contest.
Exactly, they don't.
If I linked to every marketingpilgrim post, does that give me the right to demand a reciprocal link?
Absolutely not.
Nofollowing all external links is going overboard. But no one yet has proposed a better solution.
Blacklist plugins:
+Wordpress blacklist plugin:
http://whatjapanthinks.com/wikipedia-nofollow/
+Drupal blacklist plugin:
http://knaddison.com/drupal/just-say-no-follow-...
+Andy's policy change based upon a "30 days to no-nofollow".
Granular solutions are out there beyond this binary "all external are nofollow" system that they currently have.
I think my idea of putting all external Wikipedia links on "probation" for the first 30 days, is viable.
Wikipedia get that content? Other resources, web sites perhaps?
Who contributed that content? Other web site owners maybe?
And how did anyone ever find Wikipedia to start with? Maybe following another link?
Wikipedia may be a huge powerful site, that delivers great value, now, but it wasn't always that way.
I think several people have already offered up the best suggestion. If you want it changed, then take a leading role in changing it.
Weird question. Maybe just to be reconized by search engines and get more people reading your articles?
So, get a life.Stop Spamming, Stop your freaking campaigns..
http://www.tecnocracia.com.br/arquivos/dando-o-...
Payback on them.
And then SEOs wonder why Jake Average doesn't like them.
I will try joining in...
Cheers!!
Jason S
I Blog at : http://jsbi.blogspot.com
That would be Wikipedia's problem. If they want to let just anyone add a link to the main content, they should police it.
I don't allow just anyone to post to my blog and if I decide that someone has contributed to the content of this site, I give them credit and a full link. Wikipedia should not penalize those who's content has helped build Wikipedia.
Comparing links in a comments section, with Wikipedia is apples and oranges.
But, I think that both blog comments and Wikipedia's external links both fit quite well in the "anywhere that users can add links by themselves" that Google suggests for using nofollow tags.
The actual majority of Wikipedia links are likely to come from random people who link there expecting nothing back.
Of course, if you make your livelihood from the External links section of wikipedia then I suggest you read their policy on that section of articles and think up a better way to screw with PageRank for your own good. Wikipedia is a privately owned website which can do what it wants with its links and if it thinks spam is as bad as you think it is here in your comments then they are entitled to use available features to protect themselves.
Well wikipedia has grown too much. It has now thousands or "millions" of topics. It is time to make some changes, and put some rules. It's simple, a better login/register user module. With that module, only registered users could review, add and edit the pages. The system with that could control who have written and what. When someone add a link, the system would send emails to registered users saying that user XPTO add a link ABC in section XPTO and the other registered users could review the link with wikipedia policies. Every new link added, should stay with nofollow for 15 days, and if a registered user review the link (let's say in 1-2 days, the nofollow was over. If after 15 days, the link was not reviewed by no one (wich is almost impossible), the system would delete automatically the link.
With a good group of programmers this is a simple thing to do and will not take too long. Until such a system is implemented, wikipedia should be maintened has it is. A system like this or other that gives this kind of control, yes, should be implemented.
Another blog - recommended all links to be given non-follow, for a period of 6 weeks or so, and if no one edits it ,then the link has a reason to be there.
Yet, apparently wiki does not want to listen.
Fight the power! :)
So you have people that may not even know that their external links are nofollow on their sites.
Imagine if by default people who used Wordpress and other blogging software had _all_ external links in their posts marked nofollow. These changes add up and the web loses the ability to count votes on links to determine what content is actually worthwhile.
But, I think that both blog comments and Wikipedia’s external links both fit quite well in the “anywhere that users can add links by themselves†that Google suggests for using nofollow tags.
[link removed]
1. it's not easy to put an article up in Wikipedia let alone put links inside it. really. try it. there's an army of deletionists inside wikipedia that will mark your article with speedy deletion if it doesn't subscribe to wikipedia standareds
2. it's hard enough to get second sources to be referenced by a tertiary source like like Wikipedia. I'm thinking this might discourage people to put up meaningful material there and also develope the stubs.
3. is there an alternative to wikipedia then? a wiki without the nofollow? so this is like a nofollow virus that's slowly infecting the WWW as more downstream wikis assimilate the nofollow tags
4. I'm wondering how big G will now rank relevance ... (thinking out loud) :P
Peter, this isn't a binary thing either. So, thinking about it that way only serves to keep your thoughts on the subject at a base level. Wikipedia has lots of options (as has been discussed earlier in the article and comments) that wouldn't require nofollow to stop the spam.
What are you drinking? SEOS don't want "reliable organic links." They want traffic and ranking. From Wikipedia's POV, SEOs can go take a hike. They want people contributing to make a better Wikipedia, not whiners that are out to exploit Wikipedia.
Don't I deserve lots of links from your blog for all the witty comments I leave for you? :D
I understand the new era of NOFOLLOW because of the SPAM, this and that. Now, WIKIPEDIA? You are right when you say that they have they popularity because of "everybody". So, I have just two links to them, and I'll add the NOFOLLOW right now! :D
---------------------------------------------
http://www.alwaysfinance.co.uk
Nice idea. In any case from my own experience
the no follow tag is rather futile.
Both google and yahoo still consider no follow tags as valued links. It's a fact.
it is bernard savonnet, my favourite teacher of iut informatique dijon, who says that !!!
I actually despise the concept of nofollow so much that I won't be following this campaign (although I'm already less inclined to link to Wikipedia). Nofollow is doing nothing to remove spam and everything to destroy internet community spirit and harm google rankings of new and updated media. The fact that we're starting to see it in places it wasn't originally intended for, like the critically-edited Wikipedia, should ultimately make the tag worthless (I hope) and lead to it being dropped by Google.
good luck with your campaign
All the best,
Ronald
Visits of my site went down by 40% after nofollow was applied. And I never spammed, never added a link to my site.
Now Wikipedia is at the same level of evil, if not even higher, as those stupid spammers. I am sure there could be much better ways to decide whether the links are relevant or not.
I hate Wikipedia since day I lost and they gain on my sites. And I am sure there must be a large number of similarly affected people, especially those that have websites with a lot of reliable and unique facts as I did.
You should be ashamed and get back to hell where you belong.
i think it helps indexing
Why should the useful links not be given any credit on the website that was made global by all the websites wikipedia links to!
Geld Lenen's last blog post..Reclames over geld lenen
btw i like the idea but i think it's impossible to be done :D too many webmasters, too many minds, impossible to get all of them united... plus there are surfers who find wiki useful and they don't care about follow or nofollow tags :)
Wikipedia should continue to reward the related sites containing useful information or information which was used to make the Wikipedia article in the first place. I believe they should have moderators to weed out the spam links and not punish the innocent.
My 2 cents.
John