Campaign to Reduce Wikipedia’s PageRank to Zero

Forgive me, but this seems a childish response.

They have very good reasons for doing it. They think they are serving the goals of their ambitious project by making it less appealing to marketers. While I wouldn’t mind some link love from WP, I don’t blame them a bit.

I’m still on the fence with this issue. If nofollowing will increase the quality of Wikipedia, it is really something they should go for, however chucking all of the links on the “bad” pile is a bit extreme. I think Mr. Cutts hit the nail on the head with:

“In my ideal world, Wikipedia would add nofollow to their untrusted links, but work out ways to allow trusted links to remove the nofollow attribute.”

I would have to think that search marketers comprise so little of the overall population that links to Wikipedia which would include journalists, people writing research papers, web sites that contain any kind of glossary, educational sites, etc. While it might be fun to try, I think it will have little to no impact. Kind of like David fighting a million Goliaths and still with only 5 stones.

Andy, don’t know if “What if everyone started adding the “nofollow” link to all external links?…” was in reply to me, but my $0.02

I do think Wikipedia has gone overboard but not many websites are in the same situation with thousands of pages of new content submitted every day, even if the work is distributed there must be a lot of poor quality/spam content to trawl through. I guess Wikipedia thinks its “brand” is strong enough that people will use it as a standalone search for specifics, or maybe they’re just relying on the fact that most people will be too lazy/not know about nofollows so they’ll keep all that link juice to themselves?

There are loads of options they could do, such as voting whether links are relevant/spammy, introducing some kind of Google-esque sandbox/waiting period for new links. I blogged about this several months ago, what would happen if hundreds of major websites start nofollowing links, it does kind of put a dent in how some search engines work. The big brands, using other sites to boost themselves up, then essentially cutting off the hands (links) that raised them to this position.

After that rant, I’ll always be nofollowing my Wiki links, just out of principle ‘cos I’m mean!

As clever as it may sound in reality the campaign will do very little to Wikipedia page rank. Too many bloggers are ignorant of how search engines work.

Hopefully it will at least get the Wikipedia team thinking.

I am surprised Matt Cutts supported the move.

It seems logical to put a nofollow on inbound links to wikipedia. As everybody can modify the content we can’t certify its quality

Cry more, spammer.

“I am surprised Matt Cutts supported the move. ”

Well, he personally asked me to enable nofollow last year, so I’m not too surprised.

“I think Andy is more upset at their resolution to just add nofollow tags to all of their links. It seems like they wanted a quick fix, and didn’t want to take the time to implement a process to reduce spam and to allow trusted links.”

Yep! It’s a quick fix until better tools are ready. I said as much in my announcement and requested that parties interested in helping with that get involved.

(Note that the majority of our sites have had nofollow on for a couple of years. Only portions of the English-language Wikipedia have had it off; but while it gets the most attention from watchers it’s also the most attractive for spammers.)

Thanks for the traffic, comment #18! (You *do* realize that that just *sends us traffic* and *doesn’t hurt us in any way*, right?)

Andy Beal,
I would love to do a follow-up story on you and the campaign you are starting. If interested, contact me- you know where to find me.
Rose Hunt

Andy, perhaps you’re not familiar with Wikipedia’s actual trust claims?

It’s not an abuse, Andy; it is exactly what the nofollow tag is for. Nofollow allows you to make a clickable link without making the implied statement to machine indexers that the link is known by the site maintainer to be reliable — which is exactly what you want to be able to indicate for spam magnets such as user-submitted content.

Of course, as I’ve already said, and you’ve ignored, we would like to see a more fine-grained approach in the future which takes into account human review.

I guess it’s easier to be indignant over a misunderstanding and play a childish publicity stunt, though. (Probably more fun, too!)

Congrats on making the front page on Digg Andy. I fully support your quest. Why not give some love back to the information and people who helped give it it’s power?

WikiPedia has trust. It’s built it up over time. I fully agree with allowing trusted users give trusted nofollow links.

Well, if you use Drupal and you want to join in “nofollow me to Wikipedia” you can use the http://knaddison.com/drupal/just-say-no-follow-wikipedia-links module that I just created which automatically adds nofollow to all links to en.wikipedia.org.

Enjoy!

“Until Wikipedia realizes that its popularity (and link value) has only come about because hundreds of thousands of lowly webmasters linked to the site without using the NOFOLLOW tag…”

You are leaving out an important difference: The links to Wikipedia were created by those “lowly webmasters” based on Wikipedia’s merit; and most of the external links added to Wikipedia are motivated by personal gain.

Michael Martinez “It would make more sense, in my opinion, for people to simply start linking to Britannica articles (which are editorially vetted and more accurate in general than the Wiki articles).”

I thought WP was found to be *more accurate* than Britannica after a study? WP is pretty well vetted too!

Wikipedia gets the position it does by having genuinely useful articles. Wikipedia articles don’t tend to get the top stop unless they’re actually good.

Page rank is only one of the things that go into Google’s “secret sauce.” If all the sites that are part of the commercial/SEO/spam network stopped linking to Wikipedia, Wikipedia articles would still get high ranks because of their actual content, and because there would still be links to Wikipedia from plenty of noncommercial sources.

i’ll use NOFOLLOW tag to Wikipedia ..

I’m with you. I have an Italien SEO blog and I alredy sprea the word! We will stop wikis nofollow.

Good job

Andy,

I’m in!

Doug

I see you’re complaining vigorously about a bunch of volunteers not doing enough work to please you. Just to check, you have spent a lot of time removing spammy links from Wikipedia, right? In which case, I look forward to you posting the link to your Wikipedia contributions page.

Or wait? Are you offering to write the code that carefully discerns which links to use nofollow on? Don’t forget that to run on one of the world’s highest-volume web sites, your code will have to be carefully performance tested. Post a link here, and I’m sure you can get it critiqued.

No? Hmmm… Then where do you feel you get the moral authority to boss around a bunch of volunteers whom you apparently haven’t done anything to aid? Really, I’m all ears. Next maybe you can post a YouTube video of you sitting in an armchair while criticizing people people picking up litter for not doing it the way you want.

I still can’t wrap my head around the why you believe people have a right to get a non-nofollow link from Wikipedia.

The criticizing people people picking up litter for not doing it the way you want analogy was pretty apt, on the other hand.

“why you believe people have a right to get a non-nofollow link from Wikipedia.”

Exactly, they don’t.

If I linked to every marketingpilgrim post, does that give me the right to demand a reciprocal link?

Absolutely not.

Nofollowing all external links is going overboard. But no one yet has proposed a better solution.

oh, come on dude..grow up..Wikipedia is much more of a value than crappy blogs like yours AND MINE. As a student, I have always used Wikipedia to read things that are not even in the books that are regarded bibles in the areas.

So, get a life.Stop Spamming, Stop your freaking campaigns..

Now this is great linkbait. Well done!
And then SEOs wonder why Jake Average doesn’t like them.

You have nofollow too on your blog ? let’s start a campain to bring your PR to 0…

Kind of in the same way Wikipedia doesn’t know when some idiot might stop by and spam a link and then expect to get some link-juice from them?

Haha, you’re pretty good at baiting me, that’s for sure.

But, I think that both blog comments and Wikipedia’s external links both fit quite well in the “anywhere that users can add links by themselves” that Google suggests for using nofollow tags.

They should be. Certainly. But, only someone truly naive would believe that they are.

I am not happy about the whole thing, however as many have said, Wikipedia just has too much page rank already. Check out my blog for my full opinion on the matter: http://jfischweb.com/blog/?p=12

Considering that Wikipedia is often the only relevant result, doing that would be silly.

Seriously, do the “lowly webmasters” really expect that their link into Wikipedia ensures that they will get fair treatment from the site. Thats like saying that I could link to you and you would have to link back to me.

The actual majority of Wikipedia links are likely to come from random people who link there expecting nothing back.

Of course, if you make your livelihood from the External links section of wikipedia then I suggest you read their policy on that section of articles and think up a better way to screw with PageRank for your own good. Wikipedia is a privately owned website which can do what it wants with its links and if it thinks spam is as bad as you think it is here in your comments then they are entitled to use available features to protect themselves.

¡Fóllatelos!

I agree with all my heart.

Another blog – recommended all links to be given non-follow, for a period of 6 weeks or so, and if no one edits it ,then the link has a reason to be there.

Yet, apparently wiki does not want to listen.

Fight the power!

Good point mincus. And then the big G would have to come up with a new plan on ranking the web =P

Well, SEOs have always had the talent to spam bad sites to the top of the search rankings, it will be interesting to see if they have the talent to spam.

[link removed]

Forgot to say: This has been the default for a while, actually. Nothing has changed downstream. Wikipedia’s settings don’t affect the other MediaWikis.

I doubt it discourages many people from contributing to Wikipedia. It’s a rather myopic point of view. Only SEOs even think in those terms. And, most SEOs who were submitting their links to Wikipedia are still out there submitting massive numbers of links.

“They just want to have an internet full of reliable organic links that can be used by search engines to find high quality content.”

What are you drinking? SEOS don’t want “reliable organic links.” They want traffic and ranking. From Wikipedia’s POV, SEOs can go take a hike. They want people contributing to make a better Wikipedia, not whiners that are out to exploit Wikipedia.

Well, if Wikipedia is stealing content, they deserve a DMCA notice. A citation is a citation whether it’s nofollowed or not.

Don’t I deserve lots of links from your blog for all the witty comments I leave for you?

Wiki is not stealing content i think, people steal from somewhere and inserts there, that why it has been popular.

Andy, I think the idea is great and I will “FOLLOW” it

I understand the new era of NOFOLLOW because of the SPAM, this and that. Now, WIKIPEDIA? You are right when you say that they have they popularity because of “everybody”. So, I have just two links to them, and I’ll add the NOFOLLOW right now!

For mi is Wikipedia still good source for useful info. I don’t have links on my pages on Wikipedia, but I think that external links on Wiki are not good only for SEO purposes, but also to bring traffic on these websites. When I am looking for some word on Wiki I usually follow some from external links.

Hehehe,
Nice idea. In any case from my own experience
the no follow tag is rather futile.
Both google and yahoo still consider no follow tags as valued links. It’s a fact.

…For mi is Wikipedia still good source for useful info. I don’t have links on my pages on Wikipedia, but I think that external links on Wiki are not good only for SEO purposes, but also to bring traffic on these websites. When I am looking for some word on Wiki I usually follow some from external links….

yes !!! wikipedia is bad !!!
it is bernard savonnet, my favourite teacher of iut informatique dijon, who says that !!!

Awesome! I just found out about this campaign – I hate nofollow and I can’t understand why Wikipedia would adopt it.

I actually despise the concept of nofollow so much that I won’t be following this campaign (although I’m already less inclined to link to Wikipedia). Nofollow is doing nothing to remove spam and everything to destroy internet community spirit and harm google rankings of new and updated media. The fact that we’re starting to see it in places it wasn’t originally intended for, like the critically-edited Wikipedia, should ultimately make the tag worthless (I hope) and lead to it being dropped by Google.

good luck with your campaign
All the best,
Ronald

I am also a person that doesn’t support Wiki anymore. I am just a little guy that created a sword and weapon site here, Swords, and I took the time to add history files, research on each piece, etc. A Wiki editor actually allowed linking to some of my inner pages as resource material for content included on there site and I had no issues with that, until this rule was adopted. So someone out in the world can find my work useful, publish it somewhere, and I don’t get credit anymore? I think not. I support the no follow to them.

Wikipedia behave like a robbers. They take content everywhere and do not even want the original source gave some rank.

Visits of my site went down by 40% after nofollow was applied. And I never spammed, never added a link to my site.

Now Wikipedia is at the same level of evil, if not even higher, as those stupid spammers. I am sure there could be much better ways to decide whether the links are relevant or not.

I hate Wikipedia since day I lost and they gain on my sites. And I am sure there must be a large number of similarly affected people, especially those that have websites with a lot of reliable and unique facts as I did.

You should be ashamed and get back to hell where you belong.

I really don’t agree with this. Wikipedia is great for all the ignorant people! Let them be enlightened.

The official claim is that links with the rel=nofollow attribute do not influence the search engine rankings of the target page. In addition to Google, Yahoo and MSN also support the rel=nofollow attribute.

i think it helps indexing

I think you miserably failed trying!

Geld Lenen’s last blog post..Reclames over geld lenen

correction for comment above mine, PR of wikipedia.org is 9, not 8 just checked out…

btw i like the idea but i think it’s impossible to be done too many webmasters, too many minds, impossible to get all of them united… plus there are surfers who find wiki useful and they don’t care about follow or nofollow tags

Its really sad. But I think they did this to stop spamming

Really ?? I didnt thougth so

oh…… wikipedia should allow this …

Wikipedia is a phenomenal idea and event but anymore is for few viewers or participants. Most don’t take and or have time to break out all the wikipedia language to get their content matters started and even for me it is user unfriendly. But for the point, simply stated, I forsee a mast heavy ship toppling under their own weight. They are at some point sooner than later going to run amuck also of disinformation and carry the stigma as deceiver, with information next unconnected to real issues and at last floundering on with appearance of a dead or fatally wounded dragon! View my wikipedia misnomer page – google up -wikipedia misnomer.

This is fun to some extent but still, what’s the point? It obviously will not work, as you mention yourself. If you don’t mind, I’ll spend my scarce time reading your blog

That's an interesting proposition… It's useful. Thanks.

Hi there, i read your blog from time to time and i own a similar one and i was just

wondering if you get a lot of spam comments? If so how do you stop it, any plugin
or anything you can suggest? I get so much lately it’s driving me

insane so any assistance is very much appreciated.