Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 13:10, 12 February 2005

Vote

A remove vote supports no longer adding "rel=nofollow" to external links in the English Misplaced Pages. A keep vote supports the continued use of this attribute. Please update the tally when voting.

Remove attribute: allow external links from WP to affect Google PageRanks of their targets

1. --SPUI (talk) 00:58, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
2. Slowking Man 01:04, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
3. {{User:Ævar Arnfjör<eth> Bjarmason/Sig}} 01:07, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC) The pros vastly outweigh the cons.

   If the pros vastly outweigh the cons, did you mean to vote in the other section? silsor 02:29, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)

   The pros of removing it, sorry for being vague. —{{User:Ævar Arnfjör<eth> Bjarmason/Sig}} 04:30, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)

   The Russian spambot that hammered us only a few days ago isn't enough of a con? Curps 04:39, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

   The spambot you point out spammed Misplaced Pages while the nofollow tag was in use (and had been for some time). What exactly do you think it accomplishes with regards to spambots when the very example you gave shows that it had no effect at all. —{{User:Ævar Arnfjör<eth> Bjarmason/Sig}} 05:22, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)

   I think "nofollow" was only added in the latest very recent Mediawiki release. The spambot operator was likely unaware that we recently started using "nofollow". -- Curps 05:28, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

   It was added on 2005-01-19 and the bot started spamming on 2005-01-31 which as I understand it was the first page to be spammed, correct? —{{User:Ævar Arnfjör<eth> Bjarmason/Sig}} 05:40, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)

   The PHP page was first attacked January 31 2005, and it was probably the first page (other pages attacked were mostly linked from it; the bot followed links). -- Curps 05:47, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

4. brlcad 01:17, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)
5. Khym Chanur 01:41, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
6. — Itai (f&t) 02:27, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
7. User:Anárion/sig 02:28, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
8. bdesham 02:36, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
9. If the system discriminated in any reasonable way between "good" and "bad" links, I would support. As it is now, I cannot. This is a not yet complete implementation of a not yet proven technology. - RedWordSmith 02:59, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
   • Which unproven "technology" are you referring to? It's just standard HTML. -- Curps 03:15, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
     • No it isn't. There is no "nofollow" in the W3C XHTML standard. Other people may use this value with a different meaning. Implementing Google's "nofollow" in Misplaced Pages means that me may break other bots that use this value in a different way. NSK 05:43, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
10. Jerzy(t) 03:41, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)
11. FrankH 03:57, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC) Misplaced Pages links have to be one of the highest quality sources of link that can be used to improve search results. Let's help improve search results and find some other way to stop the edit bots.
12. What Ævar said. This "solution" is ridiculous. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 04:37, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
13. Geni 05:12, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
14. Why exactly are we doing this? It's stated right there that this action won't deter spammers, so why ruin the PageRank of good resources? Mo0 05:18, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
15. As annoying as the Russian spambot has been this week, nofollow is not the right solution. Rhobite 05:24, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
16. Remove this attribute. It doesn't solve spam, it doesn't help Misplaced Pages and it affects good external links. NSK 05:40, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
17. Spammers won't know about the nofollow, and even if they did they'd want to get their link mirrored on all the sites that use our content (and on Misplaced Pages itself) for the direct traffic. Tuf-Kat 05:52, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
18. We should boost the reputation of good sites we link to. Spam is quickly removed. —Morven 06:19, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
19. It doesn't prevent link-spamming and as vandalism normally gets reverted pretty quickly anyway the chance of a search-engine bot indexing the page during the time the spamed link is there is small. Thryduulf 06:21, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
20. Eloquence* 06:24, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC) - better solutions are needed (recently added links are less valuable than those which have persisted for months, for example)
21. Johan Magnus 06:41, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
22. Academic Challenger 08:37, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
23. Remove from very active Wikipedias only, leave on those with less than say 20,000 articles. -- The Anome 10:30, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
24. --Silverback 11:32, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC) Misplaced Pages's external links are as good as the articles and the rest of the internet including users of google should benefit from them.
25. Fred Bauder 13:10, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)

Keep attribute: don't allow external links from WP to affect Google PageRanks of their targets

1. Carnildo 01:05, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
2. — Catherine\ 02:12, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC) - better to have the rep that "you can't spam Misplaced Pages"
3. Curps 02:14, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC) Removing nofollow will only encourage linkspam and more spambots hammering Misplaced Pages
4. silsor 02:20, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
5. DavidWBrooks 02:43, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC) - I encounter enough unnecessary external links as it is.
6. —Korath (Talk) 04:52, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
7. Less gaming = more content. - Nunh-huh 05:03, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC).
8. We're an NPOV encyclopedia, we shouldn't be increasing other sites page rank regardless of if they are a good reference or not. — マイケル ₪ 05:34, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
9. Sam Hocevar 11:34, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC) I don't think Misplaced Pages should reward "good" sites. If the information in the site is good, then just put that information in Misplaced Pages.
10. I wholeheartedly support this initiative, and don't think we should be engaging in the politics of search engine ranking outside Wikimedia projects. ADH (t&m) 12:08, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
11. I see no merit in giving editors control over this feature. It should be a matter of complete indifference to Misplaced Pages whether Google ranks are affected, and those to whom it does matter, for whatever reason, should be denied the opportunity to abuse the ability to affect Google rankings, since those rankings can be of no legitimate value to Misplaced Pages itself. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 12:45, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Comments

• (response to DavidWBrooks' vote)
  • Which breaking the links with rel=nofollow won't stop. User:Anárion/sig 02:48, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • This does not "break" the links in any way, they work just fine. It merely removes one very significant incentive for link spamming, especially automated industrial-scale link spamming by spambots as we have recently experienced; it does not and cannot remove all incentives to do so. -- Curps 03:11, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
      • It "breaks" how link relationships work. 'The linked document contains "nofollow" information for the current document'. So what is "nofollow" information? Rel=nofollow is a typical hack which should never be implemented: it runs counter to the standard and is implemented by a single party (google), not a standards body. It's no better than <blink> or <marquee>. User:Anárion/sig 03:16, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
        • What Google does, in this area, is more of a std than a stds body can impose. --Jerzy(t) 03:57, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)
          • It's a hack which for once does not break any standards, but it's still a hack. And your argument is the same one Netscape used for <blink>, Microsoft for <marquee>, etc.. Look where that got us now!
          • Technically, rev=nofollow would maybe make sense to some ('the current document contains 'nofollow' information for the linked document'), but rel=nofollow is absolute nonsense. In either case it is not appropriate imho. Linkspammers should be dealt with in other ways than crippling search engine functionality. User:Anárion/sig 04:09, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
            • How does using a feature which Google themselves implemented cripple the functionality of Google's own search engine? -- Curps 05:51, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
              • I'm presuming that the comment relates to search engines other than google and other web tools. Thryduulf 07:47, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
            • Nevertheless, it is unreasonable to suggest that these other search engines' functionality will be "crippled" by this proprietary Google tag. HTML parsers just ignore tags they don't understand. Yahoo's search engine technology won't crash and burn when it encounters a "nofollow". -- Curps 07:54, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • I agree with DavidWBrooks that there seem to be a quite a few unnecessary and low quality external links on the Misplaced Pages—especially in some of the less-traveled area where a link on the Misplaced Pages might have a much greater effect upon a website's PageRank when searching under that topic. I've also seen quite a few questionable links in articles on different cities, especially those that are tourist destinations. However I am not yet convinced that the nofollow tag is the appropriate or best solution to the problem. Even with the nofollow tag, the Misplaced Pages will still get link spam because they also want people to visit their websites and see the advertising on the websites. They may also be trying to get people to visit websites that try to do stealth spyware installations. The solution may end up being something more mundane and tedious, such as a special Misplaced Pages Link Patrol to try to weed out link spam and low quality links, plus questionable and inappropriate external links. BlankVerse ∅ 10:02, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)