Does anybody believe for a second Wikipedia is the only site that’s ever dealt with spam…? It’s amazing how many sites have come up with better solutions.

get lazy and re-prioritize - don’t spend so many hours removing spam links - that’s just bathing in the bloody of martyrs - well, at least, don’t do it and then complain about it.

If wikipedia is as cool as it’s cracked up to be, then it will develop an easy mechanism for external links to be moderated by the community.

Spam is just the real world, if you don’t like it, do something about it or go live in a cave, just don’t complain to everyone else.

Having his photo on the cover of so many magazines claiming he is ‘Google’s worst nightmare’ has gone to Mr Wales’ head.

Indeed, begging the question.

And with all the spam-ARTICLES, let alone poor overall quality and page-ownership by some editors, spam-links really aren’t the problem.

More: http://alexandersarchive.blogs.....h-now.html

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki.....14.2F07.29
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki.....ication.3F

It is very difficult for other wikis to compete (I am certainly not denying I have vested interests) if certain wikis are given such authority bearing links. Even if the other wikis have better information they will simply be missed.

The search engines all treat no follow links differently: http://www.searchenginejournal.....bute/4801/ but that does not mean that the playing field should not be level - coming up on google results really does matter!

Wikipedia has links to sites which share similar goals but in more specialized topics. Such links are checked beforehand to help cut down on spammers trying to get a free pass to SEO. The Interwiki system is a feature of the wiki software and is in use on many other wikis.

Wikia hosts many of these websites, because it is one of the most popular wiki hosts. Its communities request such links because, frankly, Wikipedia doesn’t want what some see as “unreferenced fancruft”, but also doesn’t want to just turn away people looking for more information, even if it is “original research”. Often, that’s the best sort.

I, like the majority of Wikipedia users, am in favour of removing nofollow on all links.

Distasteful. It needs to be all, or nothing.

Of note is that Wikia, the private for-profit company owned by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales does benefit from the current unethical situation.

Wikipedia is passing PageRank to WikiTravel
and WikiTravel passes PageRank to World66.com on every page

World66.com is a commercial “sister” site
World66 runs Google AdSense to monetize its pages. It also seems to pass PageRank to Yahoo Travel, Cruise.com, and others in its footer links (are those paid for?)

Does that sound like organic, democratic linking or carefully crafted SEO?

Let me know how other commercial travel sites get to become trusted non-spammers?

Some of the pages within Wikipedia are quite useful and make for decent abstracts that can sometimes serve as a jumping off point. But it’s just weird/wrong that it will often come ahead of more relevant and authoritative sites on a particular topic in the search results. That’s not really Wikipedia’s fault as much as it is Google’s. But when Wikipedia now regularly outranks IMDB on a search for a movie/actor or outranks a governmental site on a search for a particular agency or state then that’s just wrong. I know Wikipedia’s address and I will gladly pop-in to consult it as needed. But I don’t need to see it on seemingly every search. I wish Google would give me the option to filter it out of my search results. The way it is now, Google’s basically telling me I ought to just start using Wikipedia to search the web instead of Google. Google needs the competition, maybe we should . . .