Schools of Thought on Wikipedia & NoFollow

Carsten’s post on Search Engine Journal is where I first read that Wikipedia has added the “nofollow” attribute to all outbound links. It’s an interesting decision at minimum, but whether it really matters much is up for debate.

Rand, for example, writes on SEOmoz that it’s the “right decision”:

It may seem odd coming from someone who practices link building and whose clients require the service, but I’m glad to see that Wikipedia has shifted back to nofollow on all outbound links.

On the other hand, there’s Peter Da Vanzo writing on the V7N blog that adding “nofollow” to those links is irrelevant.

Here’s a question: why do people assume that if Wikipedia adds nofollow, then the links won’t count in search engine calculations? It wouldn’t take much for the search engines to make Wikipedia a special case, and ignore the nofollow tag, if that isn’t the case already.

Meanwhile, Andy is taking the Old Testament approach by nofollowing his outbound link to Wikipedia, which also seems like a very fair reaction.

Me? I’ve never spent a lot of time trying to place links in Wikipedia, and the few times I did — for an authoritative hobby site — they were removed in a mass cleanup of all outbound links due to spam.

That said, my suspicion is that Peter may be on to something here and I won’t be surprised in the least to see folks like Neil, a regular speaker on using Wikipedia for SEO purposes, continue doing so as if nothing has changed.

Neil, are you reading this? If so, we’d love to know if your plans will change with the nofollow news….

[tags]wikipedia, nofollow, neil patel, rand fishkin, peter da vanzo[/tags]