All Wikipedia links now NOFOLLOW
Well - looks like an option for webmasters to get a “vote” from the search engine in giving their sites credit has been closed. From now on all external links from Wikipedia will have the rel=nofollow attribute automatically placed on them.
This attribute will cause Google’s bot to “skip” the link, not giving it any credit and nor visiting it. The motive for this move is preventing spammers from abusing Wiki. However I think honest webmasters with good content and have links coming in from Wiki gets affected too. But I do know a few webmasters who abused Wiki - by placing links on unrelated and unmoderated topics.
For this blog’s case, my link was inserted under Siti Nurhaliza’s Wikipedia last year (no - it wasn’t me) - under “external links” with a description saying Datuk K’s pic is there. Back then, there weren’t many pictures of him, so I got a lot of visitors. Now, my link is gone already.
Anyway, with the new attribute, only the search engine will skip you but visitors will still click on your links (only if they are relevant though). Just use them appropriately and if your link gets removed everytime, skip the page and move on.
Links
Search Engine Journal : All Wikipedia Links Are Now NOFOLLOW
Google blog : Preventing comment spam
January 23rd, 2007 at 9:58 am
i think the search engines will still visit a link marked as nofollow but will not let it count as a vote when the linked site is ranked in the search results.
January 24th, 2007 at 12:21 am
ooo thx for the correction