Wikipedia uses nofollow hyperlinks to dominate search
Posted on May 22, 2009 by
Paul WhiteIts no secret that wikipedia dominates search. Search for anyone that
is important and you are bound to find a page on wikipedia. Upon
looking at the source code of wikipedia I noticed something very
interesting. In the main text of the Wikipedia article, most all hyperlinks are internal links to other wikipedia pages. At the bottom of the page are all the foot notes. Giving credit to the sources that provided most of the facts and figures. But what is interesting is that these foot notes all have a nofollow hyperlink, which prevents search engines from crawling them, and prevents the flow of page rank to these third party
websites. So basically Most wikipedia pages do not allow page rank to flow to external
websites. To me this is rude. Wikipedia gets its facts from these other sites, but then doesn't credit them with any
SEO.
For those of you who don't understand what I am talking about. The following link would allow search engines and
SEO to flow to the given webpage.
<a href="http://www.mywebsite.com/mypage.htm" title="my page name"> Text to link </a>The following is an example of a hyperlink that blocks search engines, and prevents
SEO spillover
<a href="http://www.mywebsite.com/mypage.htm" title="my page name" rel="nofollow"> Text to link </a>Wikipedia isn't the only one guilty of using nofollow to hog
SEO. Most major blogs do this on their comments. So when people post URLs or their own website, it prevents
SEO spill over.
This could be the reason why google is trying to push its new browser on everyone. As it will feed back information to google so they can get organic popularity information rather than link based popularity.
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