Nofollow? No way.
– posted January 23rd, 2007 by Laurence Veale Comments (4)
Nofollow on Wikipedia
Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, recently started tagging all external links on their site with “nofollow”. For you and I, if we follow a link from Wikipedia, this won’t make any difference. However, search engines, for the most part, won’t follow these links. Essentially, this means any links to your site are ignored for the purposes of ranking your website for relevancy, which affects where you’re listed on a search engine results page.
Wikipedia clearly felt that they were being gamed or spammed and that new content was not contributing to the knowledge base, but rather serving the selfish needs of the contributors by improving their search engine rankings.
There’s further discussion over at the etre blog, Reaction!
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4 comments so far
1. Des Traynor on Jan 23rd, 2007 - 15:43
It’s disappointing to see yet another concession to spammers, especially by a big site such as wikipedia.
If people had linked “nofollow” to wikipedia from the start, it wouldn’t have anything near its current status. I just hope it doesn’t start a trend.
2. Dave Davis on Jan 23rd, 2007 - 16:14
Yup. Unfortunately, the spammers have ruined another thing for the online world.
Des, you are right, WikiPedia would be mostly unknown if people didn’t “regular” link to it int he first place. Now, if the entire web nofollowed EVERY link, where would we be?
3. Lar on Jan 23rd, 2007 - 16:23
Hi Des,
you’re dead right. If it wasn’t for inbound links, Wikipedia probably wouldn’t be where it is today.
I’ve read ramblings or predictions for 2007 and one that stuck in my memory was that A-list bloggers would turn off comments on their blog because of spamming, probably relying on trackbacks from other blogs instead.
4. Norm Frenette on Feb 8th, 2007 - 13:20
I think the real problem is that link popularity has been so poluted that it does not work anymore.
Link popularity only works if it is truly a representation of what people like. If it is manipulated in anyway, it is no longer an objective, and cannot be relied upon.
I aggree with your premise, the WEB is a web, artificially cutting some of its links to preserve the sanctity of the page rank algorithm is wrong, and will not work in the long term.
In my opinion, we have a classic case of a successful company wanting to prolong its “run” with its now “old” idea. In the telegragh days, Western Union dismissed the telephone as a fad and a home toy for rich folks, and instead invested in methods to send more messages over the same wire. A lot of good that did them…
The web will live. Pagerank will die.
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