removing nofollow

[Chris Watkins]

I'd like us to remove the rel=nofollow tag from the wiki. Why?

• If a link is good enough quality that it stays on the wiki, it should get credit for that with search engines.
• Some content creators (e.g. some smart bloggers who use CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) are used extensively on Appropedia, and others will be. It's only fair that they get the search engine ranking boost that comes with these links.
• Although It's possible to remove nofollow for an external site by adding it to the interwiki map, this is extra work and awkward for linking, especially for non-wiki sites.
  
• We are not getting much automated spam (thanks largely to CAPTCHA)
• We are not getting a lot of manual spam
• It's not clear that nofollow tags actually discourage spam
• IIUC, having nofollow doesn't give any benefit to us, at least in Google ranking - the calculation by Google is the same, except that the "juice" for external links is discarded.

Yay? Nay?

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Chris Watkins

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[Jason Smithson]

I emphatically agree removing nofollow is a win for the community at large.

Let the link juice flow!

- J.
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Jason Michael Smithson
http://breakset.com/
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[Lonny]

Nice arguments!   Agreed.

-Lonny

PS When (if) we are at something close to consensus I will remove the tags from Appropedia.  Here is the information on how to remove the nofollow tags from mediawiki - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgNoFollowLinks. 

[Olivier Chaput]

I am thinking that as long as we don't make it public... (the fact) We don't encourage spammers... Since by default they would either not care and it does not make a difference or believe that wiki use the no follow.

Jean Luc do we have a similar situation? Could we imagine doing the same?

Olivier C

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[Jason Smithson]

The vast majority of spam is more or less completely automated so in my experience they don't pay any attention to nofollow at all.

Anyone caring enough to attack our site in particular by hand should be easy enough for us to care enough to revert or block.

In my experience spammers are, by their nature, lazy and frequently pretty stupid so don't worry about it too much.

- J.
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Jason Michael Smithson
http://breakset.com/
812.399.0909