Wikipedia has announced that all of its outgoing hyperlinks will now include the rel="nofollow" attribute, which instructs search engines to disregard the links. Search engines infer a page's importance by seeing who links to it – pages that get many links, especially from important sites, are deemed important and are ranked highly in search results. A link is an implied endorsement: "link love". Adding nofollow withholds Wikipedia's link love – and Wikipedia, being a popular site, has lots of link love to give.
Nofollow is intended as an anti-spam measure. Anybody can edit a Wikipedia page, so spammers can and do insert links to their unwanted sites, thereby leeching off the popularity of Wikipedia. Nofollow will reduce spammers' incentives by depriving them of any link love. Or that's the theory, at least. Bloggers tried using nofollow to attack comment spam, but it didn't reduce spam: the spammers were still eager to put their spammy text in front of readers.
Is nofollow a good idea for Wikipedia? It depends on your general attitude toward Wikipedia. The effect of nofollow is to reduce Wikipedia's influence on search engine rankings (to zero). If you think Wikipedia is mostly good, then you want it to have influence and you'll dislike its use of nofollow. If you think Wikipedia is unreliable and random, then you'll be happy to see its influence reduced.
As with regular love, it's selfish to withhold link love. Sometimes Wikipedia links to a site that competes with it for attention. Without Wikipedia's link love, the other site will rank lower, and it could lose traffic to Wikipedia. Whether intended or not, this is one effect of Wikipedia's action.
There are things Wikipedia could do to restore some of its legitimate link love without helping spammers. It could add nofollow only to links that are suspect – links that are new, or were added by an user without a solid track record on the site, or that have survived several rewrites of a page, or some combination of such factors. Even a simple policy of using nofollow for the first two weeks might work well enough. Wikipedia has the data to make these kinds of distinctions, and it's not too much to ask for a site of its importance to do the necessary programming.
But the one element missing so far in this discussion is the autonomy of the search engines. Wikipedia is asking search engines not to assign link love, but the search engines don't have to obey. Wikipedia is big enough, and quirky enough, that the search engines' ranking algorithms probably have Wikipedia-specific tweaks already. The search engines have surely studied whether Wikipedia's link love is reliable enough – and if it's not, they are surely compensating, perhaps by ignoring (or reducing the weight of) Wikipedia links, or perhaps by a rule such as ignoring links for the first few weeks.
Whether or not Wikipedia uses nofollow, the search engines are free to do whatever they think will optimize their page ranking accuracy. Wikipedia can lead, but the search engines won't necessarily nofollow.
Front page posts
I have a site that someone linked a couple years ago (the site is the #1 resource for this particular subject) on Wikipedia. My site is small and I appreciated the "link love" from a high-ranking site like Wikipedia. Therefore, I'm all for them figuring-out how to properly handle the nofollow situation.
I think that your ideas for trusted editors approving links or something like that could be implemented (and should be). Whether or not they do it, though, is another story.
The search engines, of course, will never disclose how they weight links from any site, and Wikipedia is certainly big enough and popular enough that it deserves special-case treatment. An interesting challenge is whether anybody can infer the actual behavior of the search engines based on the page rank that gets assigned (or not) as a result of Wikipedia links.
(Somewhere out there, there's a Shakespeare sonnet about love just waiting to be morphed into a discussion of nofollow.)
Matt Cutts from Google (widely known as a link spam expert) has said that he welcomes Wikipedia's decision for now:
"the incentive to create spammy links on Wikipedia has been massively reduced. As one SEO person commented on a forum, “Yeah, that sucks. All those hours spent spamming wikipedia, gone to waste…†:)"
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-did-i-miss-last-week/
(However, he also indicates that he would appreciate Wikipedia finding ways to make a selection of trusted links followable again.)
I may have mis-read wikipedia's robots.txt, but I think it does not stop search engines looking at the page history - which means even removed spam links would get some link love. If this is true, then this will cut down on random spam.
Sort-of-appropriate links on pages will continue, as people still look at wikipedia pages. But those that are looked at most are those that are edited most - so bad links would get culled just fine.
Well, it's not really that the search engines have to obey - formalistically, it's more that Wikipedia is telling the search engines that it now recommends they don't count its external links. That has "political" weight, even if it's not an automatic directive.
I don't think Wikipedia has the server resources and developers to reasonably distinguish old links from new ones. They are constantly strained.
This is an old argument, one which the blogosphere was actively involved in and lost. They argued on the side of unimpeded spamminess. Only the english edition of all the Wikimedia Foundation projects failed to implement nofollow.
And robot spamming plummeted like a rock.
Such blatant huckstering (and being invited to attend, speak at a couple of blogging conferences) were some of the reasons why I and many others started trimming back the time waste surfing the blogosphere.
You know what? I now have a subscription to the Vancouver Sun, a local dead-tree daily publication.
"You know what? I now have a subscription to the Vancouver Sun, a local dead-tree daily publication."
So, will you get the truth about issues such as, say, e-voting from the Sun?
And how much of the truth could a dead-tree publication even hope to print and stay in business? There's only so many column inches in a dead tree...
It's alright... few people can handle freedom from corporate hand-holding... at first.
But we'll be waiting when you're ready to take those first steps again.
What's missing in the robots.txt file is a restriction as to what robots can index the site. If site owners could restrict robots from certain IP addresses, this would reduce the spammers ability to stuff spam links in articles.
Part of what seems wrong with nofollow, in general, is that websites are encouraged to use it to make web search engines work better (and/or reduce the misuse of the sites' unmoderated pages), but the search engines don't reveal how they use nofollow, and there's no public record of how or if it works for what people think it works for.
Nofollow is like a blackbox with indeterminate output. The results of increasing or changing the input (e.g., more links using nofollow): indeterminate. Why? It's indeterminate.
Personally I'd rather see wikipedia put nofollow on all their internal links. THAT would stop wikipedia from being in the top ten to just about every search term - something I'm extremely sick and tired of. Wikipedia is an interesting resource, but it's NOT the number one most important link for anything.
EdB: Personally, I think that the rise of Wikipedia as a resource has contributed directly to the fall in search-engine utility. After all, if you can go look it up on Wikipedia, then what's the use of trying to look it up on Google? And so nobody cares that the first page of Google results is full of "Buy (SEARCH TERM) on iSuperDollarStore!"
Even with though nofollow has been implemented, there has been a big jump in spam links, and very low quality links being added to articles on the Wikipedia.
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! uujcgcqmzjjvou
What’s missing in the robots.txt file is a restriction as to what robots can index the site. If site owners could restrict robots from certain IP addresses, this would reduce the spammers ability to stuff spam links in articles.
I think the interesting part, google makes this job unknown so we dont know exactly what is happening.. if google is counting or not.. is nofollow links work for someting or not.. so there is always a hope :)
I think that dofollow option should be in wordpress. The problem is that now most blogs are nofollow and thus there are people looking for dofollow blogs only and when they find it they share the links with others so you get increased spam comments. If we all had dofollow blog, the spam would be spread more evenly. Of course comment moderation is a must in this scenario, but that is the way to go… id rather have comment no choice on comment moderation than no choice on dofollow/nofollow :)
[...] - bookmarked by 1 members originally found by joshuasbones on 2008-07-24 Comment on Wikipedia Leads; Will Search Engines NoFollow? by Polte http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1112#comment-387132 - bookmarked by 1 members originally found [...]
No follow is not the solution. Wiki should do the moderation . It would encourage the geninue article writer to promote their site
Cardsharing satellite TV - CCcam protocol
Okay i'll try to explain how the config works with CCcam.
To add a user you have to put a F line in the config :
F: user password 3 1 0 { 0:0:5 }
user gets all our cards at max distance(hops) of 3
He has the right to use our emu keys 1, no rights to emu keys change into 0
He has NO AU rights 0, right for AU change into 1
Furthermore he has the right to reshare all our cards 4 more times { 0:0:5 }
When number is here { 0:0:1 } he can only watch himself and he has no reshare rights.
NEVER GO ABOVE NUMBER 5!! because the distance is to far then. ( like GBOX { 5 5 })
You can set portnumber by changing this rule :
# SERVER LISTEN PORT: 12000
into
SERVER LISTEN PORT: number you want.
To connect to a CCcam server you have to add a C line:
C: ip/dyndns_server port user password yes
The yes on the end says you want to use your rights for emu keys
To connect to a newcamd server you have to add A N line:
N: ip/dyndns port user password deskey hops_away
To connect to a radegast server you need to add a R line:
R: IP/dyndns port CAID(4digits) providerID(6digits) hops_away
To connect to a Camd3 server you have to add a L line:
L: IP/dyndns port CAID(4digits) providerID(6digits) hops_away
These are the basics of the config for CCcam.
Expert setup follows
(03-30-2007 09:39 AM)
OK here we go, the above settings are the basics now we go further.
With a Cccam server you are always in controll
You decide how much your friend is going to see and how far he can reshare it
F: user password 0 0 0 { 0:0:1 }
Says that user gets only our local cards:0 and he only can watch it himself he has no reshare rights.
When changing the zero into 1 user gets our local cards and all vitual cards at a max distance of 1 hop.
If number is 2 then a max distance of 2 hops etc.
Don't exceed number 5 because the distance is then too far away for stable picture
In case U have 2 local cards and U only want that user get to see 1 u can do this excample:
Card 1 = provider CDS 0100 00006A
Card 2 = provider Premiere 1702 000000
Now you want that user only gets to see your CDS card and not the premiere card do the following
F: user password 3 1 0 { 0:0:5, 0100 00006A:1, 1702:0:0 }
This user gets all cards at maximum distance of 3 hops except 1702 because he has no rights to it :0.
He gets to reshare all our cards(local and virual) 4 times except for provider 0100 0006A because of :1.
Say you want the user to have the right to reshare 0100 0006A 2 times further then change the :1 into 3
So you see U decide what your friend(s) are entitled to see and how many rights they get, wants your card is set to reshare level 3 nobody but yourself can change that.
If you have questions feel free
(03-30-2007 09:46 AM)
Edit:
In the latest versions of CCcam it's possible to control your hops you are receiving from your peers.
Thats realy a good option now you are in control how many shares online you have.
Heavy testing for me said that 2500 shares online is maximum.
To control receiving hops just add { 0:0:x } at the end of the C line, where x is the number of hops you want to receive.
So: C: dyndnds port user passwd no { 0:0:2 } only gives me shares from that peer with max count of 2.
Important: If you dont use yes/no behind the C lines add them or:
( { 0:0:2 } ) make it like this otherwise it won't work
Thanks carp95
So plug in your dreambox and get started!
http://www.eucardsharing.com