External Wikipedia Links Now Marked nofollow

I just noticed that all the external links on Wikipedia are marked with a nofollow tag.

Why does this matter?

Links from Wikipedia have been seen as highly credible and therefore they carry a lot of weight in determining search rankings. With the nofollow attribute, in theory at least, that weight will be gone.

This could have a big effect on positioning for some websites.

Will it stop spammers?

Not sure, judging by the number of spam messages I receive on this blog on a daily basis [approx 250 / day] my guess is not really very much. The links on my site are all marked nofollow and still the spam keeps coming.

In the case of Wikipedia, there is a lot of value in the traffic that uses it, since its pages rank highly for just about everything, therefore the value of a link on Wikipedia is greater than just for the SEO benefit.

Will Wikipedia Lose its Rankings

Outbound links is a search ranking factor, and I have to wonder if now that Wikipedia is publicly admitting that it’s links are not trustworthy that it will begin to lose some of its spectacular rankings. From everything I’ve seen about the way Google works “trust” is a primary factor and Wikipedia was seen as a golden boy of trust due to its demographic and user policed methodology.

But if the spammers have won the war then all bets are off for Wikipedia’s rankings and future.

For Newbs…What’s a nofollow tag?

In early 2005 Google announced that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute would not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.

(rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.”)

Using rel=”nofollow” is a much easier solution that makes the improvised techniques above irrelevant. Most weblog software now marks reader-submitted links this way by default (with no option to disable it without code modification). A more sophisticated server software could spare the nofollow for links submitted by trusted users like those registered for a long time or on a whitelist or with a high karma. Some server software adds rel=”nofollow” to pages that have been recently edited but omits it from stable
pages, under the theory that stable pages will have had offending links removed by human editors.

Read more about the nofollow and spam in blogs.

To read more about this change check out External links in articles are now “nofollow” per Jimbo Wales on, where else, Wikipedia.

Need to know who’s using the nofollow attribute? Then you can install the SEO for Firefox extension and it will highlight any that are on a page for you. If you’re buying links you want to make sure that the site you purchased them from is not using nofollow [and also make sure that they aren't linking to their links pages using nofollow as well - a common trick].

Hat tip for the story to Search Engine Facts.

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