Thursday, January 4, 2007

Britannica’s Weird Link Scheme

By default, the full articles of Encyclopaedia Britannica (a PageRank 9 site with ~300,000 indexed pages) are hidden to readers. Try it out by visiting www.britannica.com/eb/article-9433599/Wikipedia – you’ll only be seeing an introductory snippet. However, there’s a button on top which reads “share full article with readers”, and it turns out that bloggers or webmasters can link to the article... upon which it will show its full variant to the blog’s/ website’s readers.

Hmm. This looks an awful lot like it’s intended to be the start of a link farm – give people something for free only if they link to you. Well, if you don’t want to play along, you can either ignore EB’s articles, use the “nofollow” attribute, or, as Mathias Schindler suggests, use the Free Access to Britannica Wikipedia page as a temporary link dump.

[Thanks Mathias!]

Britannica’s Weird Link S ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (7)

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