Wikipedia goes nofollow

[Kelvyn]

Wikipedia is now adding the nofollow attribute to its external links. Supposedly this is because of the rumoured SEO World Championship, but the announcement, also covered in the Wikipedia administrators noticeboard, suggests to many that this step is actually related to the increasing abuse of the Wiki by spammers posting as many backlinks as possible. Hopefully this will reduce spamming and the resource can continue to grow with useful and meaningful contributuins.

[terrie]

Kelvyn...would "no follow" prevent places like answer.com from scraping the Wikipedia content to their own site?

Terrie

[Kelvyn]

Originally Posted by terrie

Kelvyn...would "no follow" prevent places like answer.com from scraping the Wikipedia content to their own site?

No, that can and will still take place. The nofollow attribute is applied to all external links, advising search engine bots that they should not follow the link. In fact they may follow the link, but will disregard the link in determing page relevance or ranking within their index. Because WikiPedia has a high PR (due to all its incoming links) it has provided valuable (in terms of Google ranking) outgoing links - but this has been abused by just a few who have placed links to their own sites on as many pages as possible.

The change in WikiPedia was even discussed on our local radio station this morning, BBC Radio Cumbria!

[terrie]

kelvyn: No, that can and will still take place.

Ahhh...figured that was the case but was hopeful it wasn't...oh well...'-}}

Thanks...

Terrie