Follow up on nofollow

January 23rd, 2007

A rather well timed post by Chris on Thursday, commenting on the ever spreading nofollow usage. The fact Wikipedia is now using nofollow is a hot topic on many SEO blogs and forums, with opinions divided.

• Matt Cutts (Google): believes the Wikipedia have made the “right call” by removing the temptation for blackhats to add spam links to Wikipedia. (Who would have thought this would have been the opinion of an anti-spam agent?)
• Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim): Jokes (or not?) that perhaps webmasters should return Wikipedia’s mis-favour and nofollow all links going into Wikipedia, thus reducing its link juice.
• Philipp Lenssen (Google Blogoscoped): gives a nice in depth article about the “self healing” capability of Wikis and the original use of the nofollow tag. He goes on to explain why Wikipedia would be better off embracing and rewarding webmasters and the blogging community with links because of their contributions.
• Nathan Weinberg (Inside Google): gives a fairly positive spin, saying this may well only be a temporary measure until Wikipedia manages to get some better URL filtering. Giving a better insight into the divide between Wikipedians and SEOers, with a lot of Wiki editors thinking SEO is synonymous with spam.
• Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz): is fully in support of Wikipedia’s nofollow change, saying it gives spammers less motivation to add links, however doesn’t go into too much detail. He also points out that the SEO seems to be tarred by the “spam” brush also.

Personally, I’m in favour of the Matt Cutt’s vision:

In my ideal world, Wikipedia would add nofollow to their untrusted links, but work out ways to allow trusted links to remove the nofollow attribute.

However, at the current time I believe if it makes Wikipedia a better resource, then this is what they should be focussing on, not search engines.


Posted by Mark
Filed in Search Engine Optimisation