RichmondWiki.org currently adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to every external link (except the RSS feeds) based on a default MediaWiki setting. It’s an effective anti-spam measure because it lowers the incentive for link spammers to manually or automatically create gratuitous links to their sites to benefit from increased PageRank (or link ju ju, whatever you want to call it).
I could disable the automatic nofollow easily for ALL links, but I want to see if the MediaWiki community knows of any extensions that would remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute on external links after a pre-determined number of days. This would allow other website owners, the web at large, and search engines to benefit from credible, relevant links from RichmondWiki. It would also give RW editors time to review and remove spammy or gratuitous links when appropriate. This topic has been discussed as a “possible compromise” in the WikiMedia sphere, but so far I can’t find any viable solutions.
Please help if you can!
A Little Background
It’s no secret that MediaWiki adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links by default. According to the WikiMedia article on the subject,
“The primary purpose of adding rel=”nofollow” to MediaWiki is to reduce spam effectiveness on unattended and poorly-maintained third-party wikis by enabling it by default in the installation.”
I understand this, but I also feel that the rel=”nofollow” attribute is too liberally applied and it is not good net etiquette. The power of the web is its interconnectedness as measured by links. The ‘net and modern search engines are built on this theory. Plus, I don’t like to think of RichmondWiki.org as an “unattended and poorly-maintained” wiki.
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If you get such an extension, let me know as I would love to have it for the wiki I run.
If you get desperate enough for it, there is a human resources wiki with some extension developers who do work for hire who might be able to create one for you.
In Mediawiki 1.15 you will be able to set a Whitelist in your Localsettings.php. Been looking around for an extension to do that since I want to give the “good” sites linkpower and found out that this is planned for the next release.