Few months back, Wikipedia was a great source for so many people to get quality dofollow backlinks. Although, I never tried myself to get any backlink from Wikipedia for my sites. In fact I still do not understand how things work at Wikipedia and how people used to get links from this site.
Where there are dofollow links: spam is automatically attracted there. As Wikipedia became more and more popular, spammers targeted it more than ever. I myself saw few spammy looking pages at Wikipedia which were deleted after I revisited those pages after sometime.
I think that Google did a great job of introducing the nofollow tag as it helped numerous people to fight spam in their websites. One of the biggest examples will be of Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers etc.
Recently, I saw a video by Matt Cutts: this video was about nofollow tags and the non importance/Search Engine Boost that Google give to these links even if they come from sites like Wikipedia.
At the end of the video, Matt Cutts mentioned that if Wikipedia make links to quality sites dofollow then I will support that.
The important thing here is to judge the quality of a site whose link is considered to be dofollowed.
Matt Cutts said that: if there is an editor whose changes are never reverted and is trust worthy. If this editor thinks that a particular site is a trusted site and the link will benefit the users then this editor may remove the nofollow tag from such link.
Such thing means a whole new system at Wikipedia.
Before the Wikipedia’s officials consider making this change, they will surely think a lot about many things. Like: How much this big change will affect the quality of the content in their site? And will this change be worth the effort and the time that will be required to make these changes?
ben
June 22, 2009 2:28 pmThis will lead to many articles being tampered with on wikipedia as people will try and get links from wikipedia.