Comments on: Wikipedia Snubs Contributors

By: bob

bob — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:00:47 +0000

My page rank is a negative 3, is that good?

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 19:25:02 +0000

Couple of things. If your primary motivation is to increase your pagerank then that’s a little suspect to me. Of course I don’t know people’s motive but having suffered a PR of 5 myself (spam, dumb comments, irrelevant stats) I have to wonder why people want it if it’s not to game AdSense.

Secondly, PageRank is a construction of Google designed to find the most relevant sites for a search query. By gaming it with irrelevant links it loses its effectiveness and has to be tweaked. For all we know Google might have been de-emphasising links from Wikipedia user pages because they’re not producing useful results. It’s not set in stone and, outside of Google it doesn’t mean anything.

If you want readers and want Google to index you, write good content. People will link to it legitimately on their blogs and such and you will get your pagerank. If you try to game the system you’ll just clog up Google with irrelevant pages and nobody wins.

And at the end of the day the outgoing links are still going to be on Wikipedia and people will still follow them. The difference is these are people who might actually find the content useful rather than those who come through Google because the PR was artificially boosted.

By: Sara

Sara — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:20:38 +0000

I think it depends on your motives though. Yes, you can read someones profiles and link to them. One site that I help out on gets TONS of referring links from Wikipedia, which is fine for us.

But I know alot of people contribute to Wikipedia in order to help their page rank and an incoming link from a PR 7 Wikipedia page can definitely affect it.

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:13:15 +0000

Hmm, I’m not convinced. People who contribute still get recognition in the old way. Click on their name, read their profile, follow the link to their blog. That’s got way more value that cropping up high on Google for random searches.

The only real benefit a high pagerank has is on your AdSense earnings, and the vast majority of blogs only make pin money from than as it is.

There’s an interesting discussion on Jay Allen’s blog from when nofollow was introduced which touches on this subject.