UK Expert SEO

Just a quick thought. as many of you know, wikipedia has set up ‘no follow’ with all the outgoing links form the site.

‘no follow’ is a tag used to tell search engines not to follow a link. of course its up to the search engines as to weather they actually do or don’t follow a lnik. Google say they acknowledge this protocol, but i bet they follow the links nevertheless, but don’t give those links any value to the reciepient site.

So there are 5 strands here:

1. Wikipedia is a give / take thing. you give your effort and in return you are rewarded with something which will help you in the search engine rankings with Google and possibly the other major engines.

2. The founder Jimbo Wales has recently launched a new search engine called wikiseek which trawls through wikipedia for results and shows links shown on the site. These results rely on great entries and a buzzing community adding new content and keeping the whole thing in order.

Wiki seek say “The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes. ” - so what if there is no incentive by a huge part of the online community to add content and place links ?

3. I thought wikipedia was a democratic thing!, so whats with Jimbo simply telling us all - ‘no follow’ where was the community participation ? For more on wikiseek see Danny Sullivans comment

4. whats Search Wikia all about? and why take on the search engines? As you may know search wikia uses community participation to rank content. you may remember Yahoo triedhuman editing with their directory… and ultimately failed with it. So can humans do a better job than an algo? We shall see. I think the spammers will kill it in the end.

5. ever heard of a wiki nazi? with any society, when the ‘police’ get out of control it turns ugly. I think of my personal wikipedia experiences HERE and the laughable case of the linkbait page where all the references to Matt Cutts the google engineer and blogger were savagely culled. They were only reinstated after uproar from the SEO community. Fools.
So in conclusion, I see too much power with too few. fast erosion of goodwill. open day for the spamming community. dictatorship with a community front. Too many things on the boil at one time. And the core principles of ‘give and take’ being eroded with Wiki. All this will probably come to an unhappy ending much like DMOZ