Whilst skimming through my daily reads, Kottke was one of a few to break the latest news regarding Wikipedia:
“All links on Wikipedia now automatically use the ‘nofollow’ attribute, which means that when Google crawls the site, none of the links it comes across get any PageRank from appearing on Wikipedia” ~ via kottke.org
Gee, Wikipedia, aren’t you a day late and a dollar short? Surely you haven’t bought into Google’s no-follow propaganda?
Of course they have. Yet another web entity that just doesn’t “get” the idea behind no-follow and somehow believes it will help stem the spam tide, despite the mounting evidence that no-follow does no such thing and never has. Indeed about the only folks who still consider it an anti-spam tool, are Google and now Wikipedia.
Jason goes on to echo the understanding shared by most, that no-follow really doesn’t achieve anything, short of immediately ceasing giving link-love to linked in sites. Whilst hundreds of thousands of reference links will now be ignored by googles’ greyhounds, it certainly won’t cause spammers to think “Gee whiz, I guess I shouldn’t spam now?!”.
Very little spam is actually hand crafted into forms — the vast majority of it is scripted and bulk generated. Such scripts seldom take any notice of link popularity or no-follow attributes. It uses the same process perfected during WWII — the brutal art of carpet bombing, where targets are simply indiscriminate chunks of web real-estate, punched back to the stone age by wave after wave of attacks.
The decision made is massive overkill - seriously, all links? Carsten even goes on to say:
“There seems to be some need to explain what NOFOLLOW is and where it comes from. It was started by Google to fight Blog SPAM. It did not work out I might add. It then started to take new spins and created more problems and mistrust than the problem it was supposed to help solving.”
So despite all the negative press, despite the fact it does absolutely nothing1 Wikipedia is going to stoically press ahead with a change that is going to achieve little more than piss a whole lot of people off.
Nice one.
- .. other than cause grief (↩)
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of No Tags.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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