Wikipedia: Links Go In But They Don’t Come Out

Wikipedia has adopted the “nofollow” tag on all of its outgoing links, in an effort to combat SEOs that have been using it as part of an SEO contest. The contest, Globalwarming Awareness2007, saw its contestants listing themselves on a Wikipedia page about the contest, knowing it would help them win the contest (which involves achieving a high rank on Google for a particular search term), and that pissed off some Wikipedians. So, for the second time, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has dropped the hammer and made all outgoing links “nofollow”.
Wikipedia is doing this to discourage spammers, but I think they should be worried it will discourage bloggers. Lots of people link to Wikipedia, feeling that since it is an impartial and non-commercial source, it’s a good way to point readers when you write a term that they might not recognize. After this change, Wikipedia is […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg