Wikipedia Links No Longer Passing PageRank
Sunday, January 21st, 2007;
-- Andy Beal |
SEJ reports that Wikipedia has gone ahead and added the NOFOLLOW attribute to all external links, effectively dismissing any link-juice value from Wikipedia links.
While marketers may still benefit from the actual link traffic, this marks the end of receiving any PageRank value from the highly-respected resource.
So, in response, any future links to Wikipedia from us, will include a NOFOLLOW. Maybe if we all take that approach, Wikipedia will lose its PageRank and won’t have to worry about link-spam any longer. 
Join the “NOFOLLOW me to Wikipedia” campaign!
** Are you the next big name in search marketing? Enter our SEM Scholarship Contest & you could win $10,000 in prizes!
Similar posts you may like...
Save & Share: 
Category: SEM Industry, Social Media
Forward: Email This Post
January 21st, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Good response.
January 22nd, 2007 at 2:12 am
[…] Andy Beal today discussed not linking to Wikipedia any more with a followable link. I quite agree, link equity was designed to flow, that is why I also use a dofollow plugin, so people linking to me or commenting gain a backlink. No spammers get through… What are Wikipedia doing wrong? […]
January 22nd, 2007 at 2:21 am
Just linked through from my blog post on this (a rant)
If you want a plugin to backdate all though prior links, let me know.
January 22nd, 2007 at 2:29 am
That’s interesting news. With all these “no-follow” suff going on with websites, I wonder where the state of the Web is headed 6, 12, or even 18 months from now. While I understand the underlying reasons why it’s a necessary action, how will Google and other search engines react to this? I suspect the concept of “defensive SEO” (or something similar to that term, as coined by a blogger I came upon a few weeks ago) will be more vital now.
January 22nd, 2007 at 2:36 am
The thing is it isn’t a necessary action
It would be so easy to add Digg and DiggSpy functionality to Wikipedia as I mentioned in my post
January 22nd, 2007 at 5:36 am
[…] Following up from my last post, Wikipedia have just announced they too are no-following all of their outbound links. Who will be next? Social Bookmarking:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
January 22nd, 2007 at 11:04 am
I think nofollow is poisoning the web. Did you know that Wordpress adds nofollow to comment urls automatically? You even have it here on your site. This makes little sense when people filter out spam like your site does. I wrote a post about it on my site a few days ago.
January 22nd, 2007 at 11:21 am
Jason, I’m actually glad that Wordpress ads a nofollow to comment urls. Many people still try and include a link back to their site that is not relevant to the post and I am sure that I would get a whole lot more without the nofollow.
Now, if I started adding nofollow to other links, that would be crappy.
January 22nd, 2007 at 11:22 am
Hm… Nofollow from Wikipedia? Well Andy, I’d have to say I agree with you, if Wikipedia is going to give us all the shaft we may as well give it back to them. Maybe then they’ll stop ranking for everything from “Chocolate” to “Viagra“
January 22nd, 2007 at 11:25 am
Then a system for selective nofollow would work best. Where site authors can choose which comments to use nofollow on and which to exempt. Such a plugin may exist, and if not it shouldn’t be hard to create.
January 22nd, 2007 at 11:09 pm
[…] Luckily, it looks like this could be a temporary measure, but then again, it might not, and that has raised some strong opinions. Andy Beal says: So, in response, any future links to Wikipedia from us, will include a NOFOLLOW. Maybe if we all take that approach, Wikipedia will lose its PageRank and won’t have to worry about link-spam any longer. […]
January 23rd, 2007 at 1:11 am
[…] Meanwhile, Andy is taking the Old Testament approach by nofollowing his outbound link to Wikipedia, which also seems like a very fair reaction. […]
January 23rd, 2007 at 2:18 am
[…] Perhaps the most interesting response to the news came from Andy Beal at Marketing Pikgrim. He is adding NoFollow to links to Wikipedia from his site. […]
January 23rd, 2007 at 2:48 am
[…] DalÅ¡Ã poÄtenÃÄko k tématu (via vyhledavace.info) Andy Beal, Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Philipp Lenssen a Marek Prokop […]
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:16 am
Wikipedia Nofollow Plugin
Andy, something to save you some time - it saved me some as they wrote it, not me.
http://whatjapanthinks.com/wikipedia-nofollow/
Digg story http://digg.com/tech_news/Take_Revenge_The_Wikipedia_NoFollow_Plugin_F or_Wordpress
Proof it works
http://andybeard.eu/2007/01/wikipedia-nofollow-plugin.html
January 23rd, 2007 at 7:03 am
[…] Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim): Jokes (or not?) that perhaps webmasters should return Wikipedia’s mis-favour and nofollow all links going into Wikipedia, thus reducing its link juice. […]
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:51 am
I would guess that the inherit problem with this is that the majority of people linking in, probably have no clue what “nofollow†or linking is really about in the eyes of the search engine so I doubt any significant change could be brought to this by that action.
It will definately be interesting to see how this all sorts out.
January 23rd, 2007 at 2:00 pm
[…] It’s been widely reported that all external Wikipedia links have been nofollow-ed. And don’t worry — all links on non-article pages are coded by MediaWiki as “nofollow”, so no spammer gets a page ranking boost from those links when they’re on a user page.–A. B. (talk) 03:33, 20 January 2007 (UTC) […]
February 7th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
I agree with smoMashup. Nobody will read the source code ti know if “follow” or “nofollow”. And lets think speculatively: in some time Wiki can “follow” again, so, dont stop post links (its only an idea… dont post any spam…).
February 16th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
actually your campaign apears to have taken off pretty well
google search for “wikipedia pagerank” refered me to this post cause i actually wanted to know what s happened to wikipedias google juice-i did some 50 biology related searches today and in 40 of them i had to add “wiki” to my keywords to get the wikipedia article on first page.
actually it’s a!@@#e to do that sort of thing they were here to bring justice-give google juice to obscure nevertheless very relevant sites and save you minutes of google research.or something
May 24th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
i think it´s ok, that wikipedia is using “nofollow”. In the past to many spamers use wikipedia for their projects.
June 14th, 2007 at 6:20 am
[…] Andy Beal is another talking about Wikipedia nofollow. […]
November 5th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
[…] is to the wikipedia page because I was in a rush although there was enough time to adhere to the nofollow me to wikipedia campaign, just a thought this whole wikimedia donation thing they have going on perhaps they should take the […]
January 7th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
[…] Like wikipedia I am sure they will just do a blanket ban on something to stop it from being gamed, like they did with nofollowing external links on wikipedia. […]
February 25th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
[…] Thanks to Max for an interesting article: Wikipedia Links No longer passing pagerank […]