Re: Donation to W3C

[Content edited to remove identifying info from supporting contributor.  sjh]

Coralie Mercier,

Surely the W3C knows exactly what they were doing in this case. If not, why
are they allowing donators to chose their anchor text? Why not have them
listed properly by their company name as ours is "Searchen Networks Inc."?

We have no intention of manipulating search engines or pagerank, yet now we
are stuck on this page with a ton of sold links to casinos and other
non-sense links. Can you please have someone move our link off of that page
and placed somewhere else?

Anywhere is better then that page. We did not expect our link to be near
gambling and other low quality links. I am very surprised these types of
links were even given the opportunity to be listed on a page of W3C. No
wonder why the reputation of W3C is being questioned. It's not pagerank
manipulation, it's the sites they decided to point ads to. Honestly, I don't
even like our link listed near them.

Our company is not selling links and is a legitimate business and we did not
expect to be listed with so many low quality advertiser type listings.... I
would love to be a supporter long term sending money to W3C each and every
year, but a trick like this doesn't get forgotten easily... W3C should
attempt to rectify this to some point, at least for their true supporters.

Sometimes when a decision isn't an easy one, you need to resort to what just
plain feels right or wrong.... This just doesn't feel right.

It was clearly wrong to do something like this.

[...]

On 9/30/06, Coralie Mercier <coralie@w3.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 30 Sep 2006 19:58:04 -0400, [...] <clasione@gmail.com> wrote:
>

[...]

> > Our company made a donation to the W3C in excess of $1,000.00 US on
> > 2006-07-11 and as a thank you we were listed on this page:
> > http://www.w3.org/Consortium/sup
> >
> > I have now discovered that after many donations were received W3C has
> > felt the need to add the
> > "NOFOLLOW" tag to it's meta data causing a change to the effect that our
> > link will have on your site.
> > I know for a fact that this tag was not on the page before we donated as
> > it actually was a deciding factor of making the contribution to begin
> > with.
> >
> > I feel that this was a terrible decision to make, very misleading to the
> > public, and extremely disrespectful to supporters
> > of your cause. I am appalled that a company such as yours would pull
> > such a tactic and respectfully request some type of remedy.
> >
> > Frankly, I am shocked....
>
> Dear [...]
>
> We have instituted the meta element because W3C's reputation was suffering
> due to links to sites that sell page rank. We do not wish to be party to
> that behavior and the nofollow approach ensures that we do not
> inadvertently participate in that activity.
>
> We have not yet found scalable ways to provide links from the Supporters
> home page that are not subject to pagerank manipulations.
>
> Best regards,
> Coralie Mercier
>
> --
> Coralie Mercier  Communications | Administration  mailto:coralie@w3.org
>              World Wide Web Consortium - http://www.w3.org
> MIT/CSAIL - 32 Vassar St. - Room 32-G528 - Cambridge, MA 02139 - USA
> T:+33(0)872637890 F:+33(0)492387822  http://www.w3.org/People/CMercier/
>