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Wikipedia devalues outgoing links

In my last entry I talked about linking to wikipedia or to primary sources. It turns out that Wikipedia is 'nofollowing' all outgoing links. This means that all links from wikipedia are worthless for SEO purposes. Modern search engines are built on the idea that links have value, and modern web spam is built on attempts to leverage that value. With wikipedia bowing out of that model, what is going to become of search quality? If more and more sites hoard their outgoing links what will search engines use to determine what is good? This is a fundamental break in the web. Without linking, you cant tell whats related to what, and now wikipedia is hiding that information from search engines.

Link based search algorithms are clearly not good enough, so the question is - now what? I originally thought myweb from yahoo would marry social networking features to search and be the next big thing, but that product is moribund. Worse, Yahoo bought del.icio.us so the next best option for social search is out of the picture. My guess is that Google starts using its data from reader more and more to determine whats good. I'd also guess that theyll start privately ignoring nofollows on links pretty soon. They have to, because at the rate things are going every website is going to be an island soon.

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Just makes good business sense. Why allow Google to reap all the funds from online ads? By going this route, Wikipedia limits Google's ability to be THE web portal, a position that NO company should have. Google's search results are not relevant anyway. You pay to be listed, so those with the most willingness to give money to Google get listed higher in the results. So anyone can pay Google to list higher, even if that site has no relevance to the user's query. Many times I "google" something, a company's name for instance, only to have to search the Google search results for what I'm looking for, the company website. Rather than base a search on meaningful things, like terms on the web page, or the name of the company, Google charges you to list. In addition, popular sites are listed higher on the search results screen, perpetuating that site's dominance in the results. By refusing Google entry into Wikipedia, Wiki retains access to their site, and thus, retains the potential revenue generated by searching the site, thereby deflating a bloated Google. Kudo's to Wikipedia MG$

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Keyword Tags:  wikpedia   links   seo   search engine optimization

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