Wikipedia and Nofollow tags
I’ve just noticed this, although it may be old news by now. In the last few days, Wikipedia has begun adding rel=”nofollow” to their external links.
Now, I have a whole bunch of educational, informative sites, and between them, I have about 10-12 links in Wikipedia, in different languages. Please note that these links are legitimate, added by other people, since my pages are valuable resources for a variety of Wikipedia articles. So the fact that nofollow tags have been added to the external links kinda pisses me off - I have no doubt that they influenced the indexing and SERPS for the affected sites of mine.
What caused this change? As far as I know, there was no sudden insurgence of link spam on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community has in the past made it clear that they do not want nofollow links on Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia developers have publicly stated in the past that the setting to enable the nofollow tag was add to the mediawiki software for the use of smaller wikis, which do not have such large, active communities to fight linkspam. So why was it done? Who made the decision?
The recent increase in the use of the nofollow tag has me somewhat concerned. So many major sites are implementing it to avoid link spam, but where does that leave us? Link popularity is a major factor in most search engine algorithms etc…
Now, I realize that there still is a large debate ongoing on exactly what the effects of rel=”nofollow” are. There are some who content that the only effect is to stop Google PR from passing. On the other hand, if the nofollow tag happens to stop TrustRank, or authority from being forwarded to linked sites, well, this kind of threatens the stability of of any and all search algorithms that depend on such factors.
Anyone with any information, lease comment - I want to know more about the background of this, but I can’t find anything on Wikipedia, or Technorati that explains any of the reasoning for this!
EDIT: Many of my pages have been translated into languages other than english, and as such have recieved links from Wikipedias other than en.wikipedia.org. The English Wikipedia DOES NOT have the nofollow tags.
Wikis with nofollows: es, eo, de, fr, it, ja, nl, no, pl, pt, ru, fi, fl, sv… I suspect all except for en… So maybe this isn’t news… Either way, I still hate nofollows…
yeah… those stupid wiki’s!
wonder what happen if we all use nofollow to them?
Have a good one.