A friendly admin of en.WikiPedia, whom I've been talking to on several occasions about spam on WikiPedia, has just informed that because of another big SEO contest, Jimbo Wales has ordered "nofollow" to be placed on all outbound links on en.WikiPedia.
In my opinion, this is great news, as it will reduce the amount of spam in WikiPedia a lot, all though people will still be spamming it for the traffic it get's.
[tags]wikipedia, linkbuidling, seo, link building, nofollow[/tags]
And another web site abandons itself to spammers. Great! :( Why aren't they looking for a IT-partner specialized in spam protection? Very good promotion for that company and Wikipedia will not contain spam anymore.
Other solutions COULD have been thought of I think, but for the short term I'm glad they chose this route, as it will make WikiPedia a lot less attractive to spammers.
That is absolutely bogus. Did nofollow stop blog spam? If anything, it made it worse as people were less guarded in the false sense of nofollow security.
For the "smarter" SEO's, who do specifically targeted link spamming, this will cause WP to be a bit less interesting. For the "stupid" spamming, which is the same as on blogposts, it won't do anything no i'm afraid...
Well, I think there is FAR more "stupid" spamming. It wont change a thing except give less authority in SEs to those of us with valid wikipedia links.
Having seen from very close just how much spam WikiPedia get's, I can imagine them taking this step...
I hate spamming wikipedia. But it used to help my competitors, so I had to do it to stay on top. Now I can rest assured that they aren't gaining anything if I skip wikipedia.
Now that every respected site uses nofollow, will the importance of links in the algorithm diminish? Or will the importance of nofollow diminish?
Peter, with all due respect, every "respected" site does not use nofollow for their links. What are you talking about?
Smart people who are depending on search engines for their traffic will be extra careful linking out. Nofollow has become almost standard in every place that alows comments or other user generated content. Blogs, forums, link pages, review sites and some directories all used to have normal links to external sites. Now they are using either redirects or nofollow links.
Every respected site is a slight exaggeration, but I've seen news sites, government sites and commercial sites all picking up on "nofollow".
I just checked and the Dutch wikipedia (nl.wikipedia.org) also has rel no follow on external links now.
Katinka: that has been true for months already, the english wikipedia was the only one NOT to have it afaik.
Peter: I agree :)
Ehm, I had to install an extra extension to remove the no-follows here.
Nope. The extension is named dofollow, and all Wordpress's have been defaulted to nofollow in comments for quite a while now.
Yep.
yeah… those stupid wiki’s!
wonder what happen if we all use nofollow to them?
Have a good one.