Webmasters Pounce On Wiki Sandboxes

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."

Comments

Simple solution for wikis!

[Sindri]

Just delete the sandbox every 24 hours.

The no-weight tag

[IBitOBear]

It would be cool if sites could set a page or page-group with a "google weight" via a meta-tag. The weights would be from 0 to 100, with 100 being normal and 0 being no-value at all.

Then sites could take things like their sandboxes and tell people that they are zero-weighted. In fact Wiki, blog, and-such software could automatically zero-weight the free non-user and sandbox pages to prevent this kind of abuse.

Then you put a disclaimer at the top: "These pages are excluded form search engine page rankings."