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Nofollow Wikipedia Today
I am going to nofollow Wikipedia today and here is why. I am hoping others will do the same.
- A few educational things I wrote about in the past have been linked from Wikipedia. It was the choice of the editor to find and link to me which according to Google is an earned organic link right? Then why should my link be punished in Wikipedia with a nofollow tag? As Matt Cutts obviously knows, sites that do not engage in link building need all the links they can get so an editorially chosen link is like gold.
- People link to Wikipedia from their websites and blogs like crazy. It’s just part of blogging, we link to Wikipedia often making their pages appear higher in organic search and they reward us with a nofollow tag? Lame!
Matt Cutts said just today:
The nice thing is that Brion’s email mentions “Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super,” which means that Wikipedia is open to ways that allow more trustworthy links to be “follow”-able.
Yeah great idea but what if Wikipedia never works on it’s spam fighting tools?
So until Wikipedia updates it’s spam flagging tools I suggest not linking to them or using the nofollow tag until they improve their services.
Wikipedia currently ranks #1 for SEO in Google BTW people. How many more top spots in search will they hold tomorrow?
Update: Must give full link credit to Andy Beard for pointing out this new Wikipedia Nofollow Plugin, if you got a Wordpress blog using it is the right thing to do!
Although the no-follow move is certainly understandable from a spam-fighting perspective, it turns Wikipedia into something of a black hole on the Net. It sucks up vast quantities of link energy but never releases any. Nick Carr
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. Philipp Lenssen
Pro: Wikipedia is tremendous spam-bait. Con: Good sites deserve the search benefit from one of the most popular sites on the net. Seth Finkelstein
Now that’s a worrying development. The search engines would believe that Wikipedia is the actual owner of the content and will rank their pages higher in organic listings even when the content was sourced from other “credible” sites like CNN, Engadget or even your mom’s blog. Amit Agarwal
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January 23rd, 2007 at 6:07 pm
I found the easiest way to do this, and change all your old links was to use this plugin
http://whatjapanthinks.com/wikipedia-nofollow/
I had proposed to write one like it myself, but this one is ideal.
Don’t forget to give it a Digg
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Outstanding find Andy!
January 24th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
I agree, I am doing the same thing. Nofollow Wikipedia. These guys think they are gods, and it is starting to really piss me off. Dmoz all over again.