Forum:New policy on links to other pages

Today, we don't link to racist hate sites on the web, but we do link to non-racist hate sites, conspiracy teorists, alt medders, general cranks... y'know, the webshites that make our trade. I propose we scrap this policy and use "Do Not Link" on this assorted array of characters. This way, we can link to them - ALL of them - without giving them more pagerank. And this is also a good thing for us, because, as they point out, too often critics linking to these webpages, making these webpages increase Google's pagerank. -- Faunas (talk) 12:42, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
 * All external links on MediaWiki wikis use the "nofollow" property, so in theory they shouldn't be increasing anyone's search engine rank. Given the amount of linkspam on poorly maintained wikis, I doubt that Google has revised their policy on respecting the "nofollow".
 * AFAIK, the practice of not-linking to Stormfront & Co. originated when they noticed the referers (the origin of the incoming links) and RW got attention from their userbase.
 * There have also been incidents of sites using the referers to automatically redirect visitors from RW to fake pages or error messages. This is why Template:Unref was created.
 * (In case it's unclear, I'm against mass redirection. It's necessary only in select instances.)--ZooGuard (talk) 13:06, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
 * As we use "nofollow" I think we should link to everybody. It certainly won't change their Google ranking. I think Human unilaterally decided that we weren't going to link to Metapedia one time and the policy grew from there. (I could be wrong on this.)--Bob"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that." 14:01, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't think we need new policy, and "nofollow" happens automatically. On e.g. European Union Times, the links are reference links - David Gerard (talk) 08:27, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * DNL is something of the in vogue darling of the skeptic world right now. But I think it's massively overrated and somewhat largely irrelevant/useless. It's predicated on search engines working in particular ways, but those methods are constantly evolving. Facebook's algorithm can boost or decimate a site's traffic influx overnight if they play with it, ditto Google. And frequently (and increasingly), it's not so much what you link to but what keywords you use and talk about, or what else you "like" via things like Facebook, Google+ and/or Twitter. I'm indirectly boosting the traffic and prominence of some very bizarre sites merely because those topics are discussed - not linked to - on the RW Facebook group. DNL wouldn't stop that, which is going to be the big problem in the next few years if you're really concerned about accidentally promoting things or giving them too much publicity. You also have to remember that despite what skeptics might think, their opinion is in the minority. Look at the popularity of the biggest names in skepticism and you'll see it's still an order of magnitude below even the most minor of popstars. We're not the be-all and end-all of internet traffic. The ability of a skeptic group to link to, or DNL to, a certain piece of content isn't, as a rule, a major contributor of views. Only in rare, very specific circumstances does click-bait get a majority of its traffic from such detractors. But you can't host an entire site on that business model; the Daily Mail's website couldn't survive just on the odd inflammatory piece to drive traffic - it actually has legitimate supporters doing 95% of the work. DNL would have a minor effect, at best. Remembering to DNL everything we share is comparatively high effort (even mass redirecting with a bot would take time to set the bot up) for, let's be honest, absolutely zero impact. If you want to make yourself feel better by "doing something", then recycle paper. 09:30, 12 February 2014 (UTC)