Few months ago, Wikipedia decided to implement nofollow attribute to all of the links posted in its wiki. Barring only a few websites which are part of Wikipedia’s “inner circle” and of course Wikipedia itself.

Soon after this, Wikipedia’s articles started ranking better than articles on other content driven websites and to the surprise of many, even some of the stub pages in Wikipedia started to rank in top ten search engine results!

While there is a sharp divide amongst webmasters, whether Wikipedia’s move to apply nofollow attribute was the reason behind it or if it was due to tweaking of search engine algorithms by Google. However one thing is for sure, the rise of Wikipedia in search engine ranking is mainly due to the millions of inbound links Wikipedia has, which help raise the “trust score” of Wikipedia in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

Wikipedia’s move to apply nofollow attribute to outbound links, which in most cases point to the original articles/research, which form the basis of Wikipedia’s own articles, is down right appalling and sneaky.

This is simply due to the fact that, search engine sees a link placed on a webpage as a vote by the webmaster/author towards the linked article/website as being linked worthy and trusted. Adding a nofollow attribute is like saying to search engine spiders, “here is a link to a website which might be related to this article, however I don’t think the site is good or is worthy of my vote.”

This in turn dilutes the trust rank of the original researchers/authors website, which is directly in contradiction to the very principles the trust rank is based upon.

So here we have a wiki, which in itself has absolutely no content (remember its people who contribute in building the information network, not Wikipedia staff or founder) and runs on the hopes of researchers or other learned individuals parting with preciously gained information for nothing, and then they have the audacity to say that the original researcher/author cannot be trusted?

I can understand it can be difficult to keep spammers at bay as long as they see inherent gains from spamming a website, however punishing authentic web publisher as an excuse for your own lack of ability to keep your website clean is something that isn’t going to be a good thing. Especially with the recent vigor with which Google, Yahoo and MSN seem to be promoting nofollow tag.

So what can we do about this menace?

Simple! Give Wikipedia a taste of its own medicine. Put a nofollow tag every time you provide citation to an article on Wikipedia or directly link to the original source instead of linking to Wikipedia. This is what I have started doing and all the links contained in this post which refer to Wikipedia are there with the nofollow attribute.

Nofollow tag can be easily implemented in the following manner

<a href=”http://www.wikipedia.org/” rel=”nofollow”>Wikipedia Article</a>

I am in no way suggesting you use the nofollow tag for every website you link to, but only for the websites which implement it in outbound links posted on their websites. After all if they can’t play by the rules and want to become a closed community/website then let’s help them in this endeavor by either not linking to them or not providing a vote for them by applying a nofollow tag to the links to their sites.