In an effort to fight spam, Wikipedia now puts the “nofollow†to all external links on all its pages. Wikipedia’s articles rank well among search engines; they also have high Pagerank and some blackhat spammers participating in the “World Search Engine Optimization Championship†tried to exploit this by placing a bogus link which has no reference to the article at all.
I’m not surprised by this move, but it has its own pros as well as cons. Adding “nofollow†attribute to all external links would probable hurt the sentiments of those who regularly contribute to Wikipedia. Philipp Lenssen on Google Blogoscoped writes:
What happens as a consequence, in my opinion, is that Wikipedia gets valuable backlinks from all over the web, in huge quantity, and of huge importance – normal links, not “nofollow†links; this is what makes Wikipedia rank so well – but as of now, they’re not giving any of this back
I would certainly agree with Philipp in this regard. Folks at WikiMedia should work on a better spam prevention technique, like adding “nofollow†attribute to links from a particular domain (not all external links).
Some search engines like WikiSeek depend upon Wikipedia’s external links for the sake for relevancy, now that they have put nofollow attribute to all external links. Will it affect those search engines?
News Source: Search Engine Journal
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