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By on January 21, 2007

Wikipedia Links No Longer Passing PageRank

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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!


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28 comments on “Wikipedia Links No Longer Passing PageRank”

  1. xensen Says:

    January 21st, 2007 at 11:36 pm

    Good response.

  2. Wikipedia NoFollow Plugin? WikiDigg? : Blog Archive Andy Beard Says:

    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? [...]

  3. Andy Beard Says:

    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.

  4. Dale Says:

    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.

  5. Andy Beard Says:

    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

  6. zz Online Marketing Says:

    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. [...]

  7. Jason Schramm Says:

    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.

  8. Andy Beal Says:

    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.

  9. Nomadishere Says:

    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“

  10. Jason Schramm Says:

    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.

  11. » Wikipedia: Links Go In But They Don’t Come Out » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel Says:

    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. [...]

  12. Schools of Thought on Wikipedia & NoFollow » Small Business SEM Says:

    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. [...]

  13. blog.rightreading.com » NoFollow revisited Says:

    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. [...]

  14. Fandorovy vyprávÄ›nky » Blog Archive » Wikipedia zavedla No-Follow? No-A-Co? Says:

    January 23rd, 2007 at 2:48 am

    [...] Další počteníčko k tématu (via vyhledavace.info) Andy Beal, Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Philipp Lenssen a Marek Prokop [...]

  15. Andy Beard Says:

    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

  16. zz Online Marketing Says:

    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. [...]

  17. smoMashup Says:

    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.

  18. Wikipedia Hates SEO | Macalua.com Says:

    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) [...]

  19. Webproject Says:

    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…).

  20. maarcis Says:

    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

  21. warhammer 40k Says:

    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.

  22. Wikipedia link to my logo designer article : David Airey :: Creative Design :: Says:

    June 14th, 2007 at 6:20 am

    [...] Andy Beal is another talking about Wikipedia nofollow. [...]

  23. Happy Bonfire Night/Guy Fawkes Night :: UK SEO/SEM BLOG >> B10G Says:

    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 [...]

  24. Wikia Search, is it any good? :: UK SEO/SEM BLOG >> B10G Says:

    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. [...]

  25. New Media Research Studio : Wikipedia Links No longer passing pagerank Says:

    February 25th, 2008 at 10:14 pm

    [...] Thanks to Max for an interesting article: Wikipedia Links No longer passing pagerank [...]

  26. web design Says:

    May 26th, 2008 at 1:41 am

    Its a pity Wikipedia has done this, one of the reasons so many people wrote articles was so that they could get linked.

  27. Niraj Says:

    August 16th, 2008 at 6:55 pm

    But I think there are other factor which does not get filter out with nofollow up tag

  28. vikas Says:

    August 27th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

    wat is this …. may be to stop spamming