Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms? Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from the well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?

Even though SEOs may feel like that nofollow is everywhere on the web, if you look at the percentage of links that have nofollow, it’s actually a pretty miniscule percentage. Nofollows are not that common on the web compared to how perception of it might be.

We’re not taking into account links from Wikipedia because they are nofollowed. So don’t bother spamming Wikipedia. It’s not going to make any difference in search engine rankings if you get a link, because it will be nofollowed.

If you have a great resource and people find of you on Wikipedia, and it’s just fantastic, and people link to that because of that.

Or you’re getting traffic from a link in terms of direct surfers of visitors, then that might benefit your site. It’s not going to get any search engine ranking boost just because Wikipedia links to you with those nofollow links.

Let me take one slight detour, and mention that if a particular site does have trust in the person who’s making the link, then there’s plenty of good reasons to make that link flow PageRank and take the nofollow off.

For example, Wikipedia has experimented with all kinds of different ways to improve their process; maybe anonymous edits have to be approved before they go live.

So you can certainly imagine a scenario in which Wikipedia editor, who is very trusted, who had made a ton of edits without them ever being reverted, that other editors vouched for however they wanted to define trust. Those links might, for example, take the nofollow off.

So a very simple thing for when you’re being under attack from spammers is add that nofollow tag, and then it doesn’t benefit the spammers anymore. But if you run a blog or a forum or Wikipedia, you can come up with a good metric to say ‘Ok, these are the links that we do trust, that we think are editorially given and are valuable for users’, then there’s plenty of reasons to say ‘Make those links flow PageRank”.

But, in general, nofollow links are relatively small percentage of the web and it does prevent a lot of sites from getting spammed. We don’t use those links from Wikipedia currently, but if Wikipedia wanted to put more nuance policy in place, I would definitely support that.

Related posts:

1. As Google’s algorithms evolve, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links? By links I mean inbound link quality/quantity. Can you sites with awesome content outrank mediocre/established sites?
2. If you have inbound links from reputable sites, but those sites do not show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you are not getting any “credit” in Google’s eyes for having inbound links?
3. Does Google value its own links for PR/Linkjuice? Google Bookmarks, Google Profiles, etc. Reason – Google links never appear in Webmaster Tools
4. How accurate is Google’s backlink check (link:…)? Are all nofollow backlinks filtered out or why does Yahoo/MSN show quite more backlink results?
5. Now that Google can crawl JavaScript links, what is going to happen to all those paid links that were behind JavaScript code? Will Google start penalizing them?