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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wrote, on January 23rd, 2007
This is a good move to avoid spammers targetting vista.But very bad for content publishers
wrote, on April 28th, 2007
This is good for prevent spamming, however i have very great articles for Turkish people and i would like to have some quality from wiki, but nofollow tag is not good for original content publishers like me. My website is small, but i only publish articles written by me.
wrote, on June 6th, 2007
[...] to add rel=”nofollow” attribute on all external links of their articles, many blogs and sites had pronounced in support or protest. The attribute in question makes the presented links to be [...]
wrote, on August 13th, 2007
I cant believe it. Yesterday i worked 3 hours to get a link to my blog ( http://www.seo.webarticles.dk ) on Wikipedia! That is so unfair! But now people got no reason to post on that site…? Is that a good thing for Wikipedia?
wrote, on August 18th, 2007
It’s very sad that some bunch of people using black hat technique do such spamming activities. There should be a method devised so as to ban only the spammers and innocent and modest posters like us should be saved from the ill efforts taken by others. But I guess it is a very difficult task to differentiate between the black hat and the white hat guys….
wrote, on August 19th, 2007
I do not agree with this to. That’s very unfair, wikipedia editors delete all link withc aren’t related with article. However this is very unfair for publishers. What on earth will motivate them?
wrote, on September 6th, 2007
Yeahh. William - it was not your day. Wiki with it’s resources can filter “black” links with no problems. Maybe it is temporary solution?
wrote, on September 20th, 2007
I think they must find a better way to prevent spam .
Making nofollow links will hurt publishers.
wrote, on October 16th, 2007
Seems to be the way of the world. You have a great resource which people use for legit sites. Then a blackhater will come in and ruin it for the rest of us.
wrote, on November 15th, 2007
It seems to have come very late in the day. I was about time. Those genuinely interested in contributing towards wiki will always be there and since its become a huge resource. Sites will keep linking back and talking about the same.
wrote, on February 11th, 2008
It’s right decision - to protect Wiki of spammer, but it is bad for content publishers too
wrote, on February 12th, 2008
This is unfortunate, but the amount of man power it would take to combat this type of spam is too much. It’s becoming more common on the net.
wrote, on May 5th, 2008
Did not they have nofollow for ages now? Anyways, I have solid proof that nofollow will still count. It’s just it wont parse PR and no one cares about PR anyway. I would post a link to my article on nofollow but then I will probably sound like a spammer.
wrote, on August 9th, 2008
Im not sure why they are doing this. If you try and post a link to your website they delete it. So it does’nt make a difference.
wrote, on August 18th, 2008
Well I don’t blame them. I’d do the same.
wrote, on September 23rd, 2008
I am not surprised either. He he. Who love spammers?
William, nothing is free in this world, leave wiki alone, otherwise it becomes to a rubish bin!