The Marketing Technology Blog

Did you see Andy Beal’s campaign to get people to “nofollow” their links to Wikipedia? It seems only fair.

I don’t understand the logic behind this latest move by Wikipedia. The whole point of the links on Wikipedia pages is to reference the sites that the articles source their content from. If the sites referenced can’t be trusted enough to have normal links, why should they be trusted as references for an article? I can understand adding “nofollow” to new links until they undergo some sort of review, but adding it permanently to all outgoing links just seems wrong.

Even i felt the same! wikipedia disappointed us!

The whole nofollow issue is a very interesting. By not having the nofollow tags you promote commenting, but also promote spamming (and make the spam that get’s by more effective). I have found Akismet to be effective enough that I agree with what you are doing though…

As for Wikipedia- just to play devil’s advocate- I am not sure everyone sees it as a give/take relationship, in a financial sense. Yes, an information exchange, but making from a free service like that coud definitely get the community in an uproar. If you were adding good content and pertinent links, it should be fine, but how many spammers were deterred by Wikipedia adding those nofollow tags? Plus, the money you donate is normally to support the site that you use for information, not a kickback ; )

You bring a good point, but I don’t know what the stats are for between donators and owners of websites with links on wikipedia. I’d assume it was low, but it’s still a good point, but not one that they’d care for - since the whole point of this new decision was to get rid of self-promotion ( I assume you added your own link to wikipedia?)

You donated to a not-for-profit organization, you didn’t pay for a service.

The question really is what did you donate to Wikipedia for? Was it to provide backlinks to your blog or was it to help build an encyclopedia? If you were to argue to have your donation returned, Wikipedia could argue the latter. They aren’t under any obligation to assist with your search engine rankings, although it was always a nice bonus.

It’s a shame that abuse of the system has lead to nofollow being implemented, but it doesn’t detract from Wikipedia’s goal at all.

Firstly, thanks for for removing nofollow from your blog. I’ve done the same on mine.

By adding nofollow to Wikipedia, they are not tackling the problem but just the symptom.

You raise an interesting question. I wonder if Wikipedia intentionally chose to implement this functionality after they got the donations. I guess they took the money and ran.

Payback on wikipedia.
No Follow Plugin

I have the feeling that nofollow links will eventually (they might allready do) contribute to your search engine ranking.

Just think about what a nofollow link is: It’s the most unbiased, unspammed and PR-greed free link on the Net. What search engine in their right mind would disregard this additional information on a websites importance.

I’m sure Google have a secret nofollow rank for webpages

I have been told Wikipedia have also added no follow to the comment linkbacks

Changing to no follow was a very misleading step for wiki to take and im sure they suffered in terms on content creation as a result. On the other hand its not all bad, you can still get traffic from your links.

I jumped into the blog game fairly recently, when wikipedia had already implemented the nofollow thing, so I missed that boat. I must say though, that I linked to an article on one of my blogs from a wikipedia page and it is still a large contributer of traffic.

[...] For all you folks that have read Wikinomics, you understand the value in a collaborative project. Wikipedia is a fantastic example of this - thousands of people adding to the content of an online [...]