On 6 November 2010 01:20, Seth Finkelstein <se...@sethf.com> wrote: > Nobody knows, because the unknown factor in such calculations > is whether Google would continue to bless Wikipedia so heavily if it > started running ads. You cannot assume that the current dominance in > search ranking would be maintained. Google can - and does - tweak > algorithmic factors, which then have profound effects on what types of > sites rank highly.
Err from google's POV it's in their financial interest for sights that feature their ads to be high in the SERPS. Large numbers of people going to a site which doesn't host their ads means large numbers of lost clicks on google ads. As for tweak algorithmic factors firstly it's already happened at least once (there was a noticeable drop in wikipedia's Google SERPS positions a few years back). Secondly since both bing and yahoo rank wikipedia highly (in fact while I haven't checked recently for a long time google ranked wikipedia lower than those two) it seems unlikely that any reasonable algorithmic change would kill off wikipedia's traffic. -- geni _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
