Wikipedia adds nofollow to external links

From the Search Engine Journal, All Wikipedia Links Are Now NOFOLLOW:

I blogged about the Wikipedia Issues with SPAM and the discussions about the use of NOFOLLOW for ALL external Links from Wikipedia. It was done, finally.

As of now are all outbound links from the english Wikipedia Site using the NOFOLLOW attribute, no exceptions.

No matter where you place it, Article Page, Talk Page, User Page, Project Page, whatever. No Link will get any credit at the major search engines.

What does this mean for you my fellow bloggers? Well, you still get that link if your site or blog has been added as an external source, along with it the referral traffic. That’s about it actually.

What does this mean to the SEO guys? Well, they could start by ~~firing~~ letting go everybody in the Wikipedia Contributor Department.

Does it matter? Not much really but if you (partly) live off PR juice and Wikipedia link loving, you’re basically screwed. Naah, just kidding. Besides, not all of the big search engines follow the nofollow tag.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

14 Comments

Jazzy says:

18 years ago

Prior to this, I never thought of having link from wikipedia will help in terms of SEO, as obviously it is wide open from abuse.
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Ang-ang says:

18 years ago

That’s good to hear I hate yahoo I love Google hehhe
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Miguel says:

18 years ago

That’s good news for Wikipedia editors like myself who have to check and clean spammy links!

If your link is good, then people will click naturally.
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Andrew says:

18 years ago

Noooo! Hehe. That’s ok, I only have two links on Wikipedia that’s not helping much in terms of traffic anyway.
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Titopao says:

18 years ago

Links to blogs are actually not allowed on Wikipedia, according to the following WP policy pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

Whenever I see a link to a blog, I remove it immediately, no questions asked. The only exception would be a notable person’s official blog, if the link was included in the article about this person.
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SEO says:

18 years ago

yeahâ€¦ those stupid wikiâ€™s!
wonder what happen if we all use nofollow to them?

Have a good one.
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John Illnes says:

17 years ago

The official claim is that links with the rel=nofollow attribute do not influence the search engine rankings of the target page. In addition to Google, Yahoo and MSN also support the rel=nofollow attribute.

i think it helps indexing
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Blackpool says:

16 years ago

Better start with SEO then
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seo jaipur says:

16 years ago

yaa right nice idea i will follow it
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Jamie@Morbie Load Philippines says:

15 years ago

What a relief to discover a page that may be ultimately really worth reading! I’ve been seeking all-around about this topic but men and women just put rubbish posts, or brief meaningless posts. I have seen a couple vids on youtube but it’s now the same as reading a good post. Great job!
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