Jan 22nd, 2007
Wikipedia NoFollow
Wikipedia recently had a Search Engine contest that was apparently held to give them ideas on how to become more search engine friendly. The biggest thing that came from this contest is the announcement from Wikipedia that all external links are now “nofollow” links.
Nofollow links are links on a site that the major search engines will not follow and so the link is not worth anything as far as search engine optimization goes. This decision came about because wikipedia was getting spammed by search engine marketers who would put links up on wikipedia to their sites which would help their rankings. This obviously wouldn’t have been a problem except that people were abusing wikipedia.
I think that this was a great move by Wikipedia because now, their results will be more accurate and more objective. The external links will also be more objective because most of the usefulness was removed by the nofollow link rule. Of course, people will still be able to receive traffic from these sites which will still be enough reason for some people to spam wikipedia.