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Webmasters Pounce On Wiki Sandboxes

Posted by simoniker on from the fold-spindle-mutilate dept.

Yacoubean writes "Wiki sandboxes are normally used to learn the syntax of wiki posts. But webmasters may soon deluge these handy tools with links back to their site, not to get clicks, but to increase Google page rank. One such webmaster recently demonstrated this successfully. Isn't it time for Google finally to put some work into refining their results to exclude tricks like this? I know all the bloggers and wiki maintainers would sure appreciate it."

2 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. Cyberneighborhood Not-Watch? by raehl · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In the real world, there are neighborhood watch signs to "deter" criminals.

    Perhaps there could be a command in the robots.txt file which says "Browse my site, but don't count any links here for page ranking"? That would make your site less of a target for spammers, but not prevent you from being ranked at all.

    --
    paintball
  2. Complacency by faust2097 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Isn't it time for Google finally to put some work into refining their results to exclude tricks like this?

    It was time to do that at least a year ago. It's pretty much impossible to find good information on any popular consumer product and this is a problem that's been around for a long time.

    But they're too busy making an email application with 9 frames and 200k of Javascript to pay attention to the reason people use them in the first place. It's a little disappointing, I'm an AltaVista alumni and I got to watch them forget about search and do a bunch of useless crap instead, then die. I was hoping Google would be different.