Wikipedia adds "nofollow" attribute to external links

Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP¹, I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace. (Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)

That means, in essence, that the links become invisible to search engines like Google's. The engines won't take the links into account in ranking search results. Wikipedia is adopting the policy to reduce spammers' incentives to add spam links to the encyclopedia. I wonder, though, if it could also have the effect of reinforcing Wikipedia's hegemony over search results.

Wikipedia doesn't want to become the playground of spammers so they implemented a major change today that makes their website less interesting to spammers.

Any URL on Wikipedia website that points to a location other than en.wikipedia.org is now stuffed with rel=nofollow tag meaning Wikipedia won't help bring any Google juice for your site.

So whether it's the CNN website or a PayPal phishing site or an illegal Viagra store, Wikipedia will have the same policy for all - we don't trust you so you get the rel=nofollow tag.

Now that's a worrying development. The search engines would believe that Wikipedia is the actual owner of the content and will rank their pages higher in organic listings even when the content was sourced from other "credible" sites like CNN, Engadget or even your mom's blog.

I haven't spoken with Jimmy about this, but I think this is the wrong decision. As blogged previously, nofollow is a partial fit for blog comments, but not wikis :

I should mention that the wiki world isn't wild about nofollow for at least one simple reason. On a blog you have an author and the audience (commentators?). Within a wiki, everyone is an author. We are still evaluating where we will use nofollow, I personally see it as great industry cooperation creating a tool to use.

Unfortunately this is throwing the baby out with the spamwater. We need an alternative to this broad stroke. Wikipedia is perhaps the best source of outbound links on the web, with a no-spam policy that while expensive to implement, largely works. I'm concerned about how this effects the health of the web, search result and what precedent it sets for indexing public wikis as a whole.

Wikipedia is now one of those rare sources on the web that has a golden door. In other words, it doesn't need an entry point through a search engine for people to 'discover' it. If anything, its appearance in search engine results is a distraction. It would be like Google linking to Yahoo's search result of a term, or Yahoo linking to Google's: yeah, we all know they're there but show me something new or different.