January 22, 2007
Wikipedia Links are Now NOFOLLOW
People have been using Wikipedia as a way to get high-pagerank pages linking to their sites. They used all sorts of techniques to spam the online user-created-and-maintained encyclopedia.
So now it has gotten to the point where all Wikipedia links are being marked as “nofollow.”
The nofollow tag was agreed upon by the major search engines to combat comment spam in blogs about two years ago.
The mailing list message about why its being done seems to imply it may be a temporary move…take a look at the email subject:
Nofollow back on URL links on en.wikipedia.org articles for now
Emphasis is mine.
What may not be taken into consideration is that the actual code and database is available for download and used by many sites. Those links have already (and will continue to be) propogated until those other sites change/update their code and/or database.








» Wikipedia: Links Go In But They Don’t Come Out » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel said,
January 22, 2007 @ 8:28 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. […]
Doug Karr said,
January 27, 2007 @ 10:32 am
I have begun utilizing nofollow whenever I use a wikipedia link. As well, I’m overwriting the nofollow code on my site to promote my commentors.
SEO said,
July 22, 2007 @ 12:16 am
yeah… those stupid wiki’s!
wonder what happen if we all use nofollow to them?
Have a good one.