Hello,

I have sent the following e-mail message to suggestions / google.com. It's an
idea that could dramatically help reduce the Wiki Spam problem on the Ruby
Garden Wiki.  The spam problem on that Wiki is getting really bad:

*********

Hello Google,

Because of the Google Page Rank land grab, there are web sites running
scripts to deface popular Wikis with links to their site. For a dramatic
example look at the Revision history page for the Ruby Garden Wiki:

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RecentChanges

The problem is, even though, we diligently delete the spam as it shows up,
most Wikis archive the old revisions in a revision list. Google (you) crawls
these revision list pages and finds the deleted spam links. In fact, you
find a lot of them because the spammers keep coming back and we keep
deleting them, creating lots of revision history pages that you crawl.

Here's a VERY SIMPLE way for you to help out the thousands of Wikis out
there.

Allow the Wiki owners to add an HTML tag to the web page called
<NO_EXTERNAL_PAGE_RANK/>. If you find this tag on the web page, then only
for off-site URL's, you do not follow any external links on the page, or
pass on any page rank to the target web site.

The Wiki owners could place this HTML tag in the non-editable portion of a
web page. So on the main page they would NOT use this HTML tag so that page
rank would be properly passed on. But they would put it on any revision
history pages so they would not.

Once this gets around the spammers would probably check for the tag too with
this script, and leave the Wiki(s) alone. It's kind of like the "this house
protected by Almar security" sticker.

This would be a very useful feature for Bloggers and their blog comments,
and discussion forums too.

*********

If you like the idea, then others of you might want to send a similar e-mail
too, to apply (positive) pressure to Google.

Thank.
-- 
Robert