Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-452-20140828002814/@comment-452-20140912122607

Thank you for your reply, Mor123.

Regarding SEO - I've heard this before and ignored it because I didn't care, but I've checked now and it's a non-reason, since all wikipedia.org and wikia.com links appear to be whitelisted anyway, so do not have "nofollow" set. For example:
 * http://ghostbusters.wikia.com/wiki/Slimer
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slimer
 * http://www.ghostbusters.com/

I'm glad you agree that Special:LinkSearch is designed to monitor what goes out.

I've never heard of any "long-standing policy of not using external links anywhere but in the external section". It seems like this is probably just another thing that someone made up on one wiki and people assume applies to all wikis without questioning it. (Read about this phenomenon)

Keeping external links together in an external link section would remove the need for displaying the external link icon, but I think it's more useful to use them inline as needed.

However, a discussion about using external links at all is a different topic.

I did mention Portability, but I did forget to add it to the list at the end, I'll add it now. As I said, I'm mostly talking about interwiki links to Wikia: Wikia is unlikely to change it's domain, and every wiki rename I have ever seen leaves a redirect.

Interesting idea about editing entries in the interwiki table. I suppose if I a wiki wanted to change which of 2 similar wikis they were affiliated with, then "w:c:ghostbusters:" could theoretically be changed to land on "the-real-ghostbusters.wikia", which would definitely be useful - but I assume that is something that only Wikia Staff could do, and something they're incredibly unlikely to do, because w:c:ghostbusters should always point to ghostbusters.wikia on all wikis.

Can anyone else suggest any reasons I should use them?