The Danger of Nofollow
All links to external sites on wikipedia are now to be automatically marked “nofollow”. The “nofollow” attribute is an attribute introduced by Google that instructs their crawlers not to follow the link, or give any Pagerank weight to it (which is apparently OK, because Google Are Nice, despite the fact that y’know, if it’d been Microsoft, there’d have been an storm of whinging, but that’s a topic for another time).
Wikipedia are doing this to discouraging linkspam - people editing bogus links into Wikipedia articles in order to boost their pages Pagerank. As an anti-spam measure it makes sense.
Here’s the problem: the articles that Wikipedia links to legitimately should get their Pagerank boosted. They’re being quoted as relevant by an article that is supposed to be an encyclopaedic reference on the topic. They’re being quoted as authoritative sources. Wikipedia, in an effort to stop spam, is deforming the visibility in Google’s index that other pages deserve.
Solution? I don’t know. Given the size and relative importance of the two operations, I would have hoped that Google and Wikipedia might have sat down and tried to work something out.
And, I would note that while the “nofollow” attribute might have helped Google’s index, there’s very little evidence that it’s had any effect on the behaviour of spammers. “First: Do No Evil” doesn’t seem to have applied here - they’ve put the purity of their index over the fair treatment of non-spamming websites.
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