The Gong Show

Wikipedia Rel=NoFollow

Why are all external links on Wikipedia marked as Rel=Nofollow? For those unfamiliar, rel=nofollow means that search engine web crawlers will not follow these links; therefore, they will not benefit the destination site’s PageRank in Google.

I know the obvious arguement for marking Wikipedia external links as rel=nofollow, which is that it will prevent spammers from using Wikipedia’s PageRank for their own benefit by pointing a bunch of Wikipedia external links towards their own spam sites.

But, that argument is lame because spammers already have PLENTY of incentive to make a bunch of external links to spam sites on Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is a traffic firehose because of all its visitors, and each external link a spammer points to their external site will generate a bunch of traffic for them. So, I don’t think marking external links as rel=nofollow discourages spammers.

Instead, marking external links as rel=nofollow just punishes legitimate sites that should rightly benefit from being linked to by Wikipedia.  For example, The United Nations Human Rights Council page on Wikipedia references the official website for this organization in the first link of the External Links section of the page.  Yet, the UN Human Rights Council receives no PageRank benefit for that mention. If anything, the official site of this organization is more canonical than even the Wikipedia page itself and deserves to rank highest for a search on this term.  So, it should really receive the benefit of Wikipedia’s link.

If I thought rel=nofollow actually discouraged spammers at all, then I could understand Wikipedia’s decision, but I really doubt there’s any benefit to spam prevention, so I would love to be able to remove the rel=nofollow attribute whenever I make an external link while editing Wikipedia.