Spam attacks - and a change

[redbox]

However, I have set the nofollow directive for our installation, so Google does not even consider them

This hurts your SEO and could explain why the website is lower in Google rankings than you would like.

[Gryzor]

Actually, I'm not sure about this. $wgNoFollowLinks makes only *external* links not follow-able, internal structure remains intact. On the other hand, if you mean that Google 'punishes' sites that use nofollow , I didn't find any indication of that (though there seems to be some discussion on it).

In any case, strange thing: I added this line only a few days ago, so it would have had no time for what you're saying. BUT, I just realised that even without it, Mediawiki defaults to 'true', so it was like that all along, possibly. Which could mean that, if Google does punish sites, it *could* be a reason.

If you care to explain why you say that I might disable it altogether...

[redbox]

If you care to explain why you say that I might disable it altogether...

Can't offer anything more concrete than experience I'm afraid.


Have seen several websites 'section off' parts of their websites with nofollow exceptions and this has severely hurt their SEO.  Turn it back on and one crawl later everything is back to normal.


Would also make sense considering the alleged algorithm that Google uses - the external followed links are what build page ranks, so any website that isn't playing ball would hurt the relevancy of their results.

[Gryzor]

Well, that's good enough - experience, I mean. I was thinking along the same lines when I mentioned 'punishment', though nofollow was put in place exactly to battle Search Engine spam... go figure. Wikipedia still has it, by the way, and I would assume they're pretty neat about such things.

In any case, I've removed it - spam is too low anyhow -, so now let's sit back and watch as we zoom past Youtube and Wikipedia

[Gryzor]

Hahaha! We just had our first non-commerial spam: a link to a site preaching the Quran.

Stupid trivia of the day: the main video proclaiming "Christian Scientist admits the Quran is true!". I mean, no matter what your religion, how can the Quran (or the Bible etc) cannot be 'true'?

[Ritchardo]

I may well have missed something here so forgive me if this has been mentioned before but I encountered something different today when trying to update a page on the wiki.

Finally got some spare time so decided to tart up the Cyrus II Chess page - made all of my changes, checked it on preview and went to save the page but the page didn't update.  Tried clicking again and then I noticed what appears to be a spam protection measure asking me to insert the contents of two boxes into a field to allow me to update as I had added new external links (WOS, GB64, Generation MSX and CPC Game Reviews to be exact).  Unfortunately no boxes appeared nor was there any refresh option or anything of that ilk just an empty field.  I saved the code I had written to a wordpad document and planned to try again at home at some point (assuming that this was due to a bug with the crappy old version of IE that my workplace insists on using) but thought I'd better post here just in case it's not and there is actually something wrong somewhere!

[Gryzor]

Hmmm thanks for letting me know... from the sound of it it was the recaptcha module that was missing. Maybe your work proxy blocked that? If you could try again from home and, maybe, tomorrow again from the office to verify I'd be grateful...

The captcha thing though doesn't have "two boxes into one field", it's only one box with an image, so I'm not 100% sure. If you encounter this again from home, could you take a screenshot?

Thanks!

[Gryzor]

...I think we've won. Good riddance!