Every Wikipedia Link is Now NOFOLLOW

In an effort to combat spam, Wikipedia has changed all it’s links over to nofollow, meaning they will no longer pass pagerank and count as an “editorial vote” for that page. Wikipedia links use to be a great way to build pr and trust for people with excellent sites that were less commercial oriented, or at least had sections that were (Wikipedia is notorious for disallowing sites with commercial intent, although that is slowly changing and the links are becoming more main stream.) Even without passing page rank the value of a link from Wikipedia link is still great for driving quality traffic and I have a sneaking suspecion Google may eventually (or even right now) still give some extra “value” of some sort from links on popular Wikipedia pages, but that’s just a hunch. I mean heck, any spam links are removed within hours and every external link has to go through editorial review, it’s one of the better checks for the value of a site.

Officially Google, MSN, and Yahoo all teamed up to adopt the nofollow attribute, but the nofollow links still show up on link searches. Additionally Google still gives page rank to pages with “noindex” “noarchive” “nofollow” meta tags and ranks those pages for specific quieres (like the exact title search). MSN and Yahoo also still index and rank pages that are “suppose” to be purposely invisible. A good example of this will is individual de.licio.us user pages. They are in the cache, show up in the results (for very specific searches mind you), and can have page rank.


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