Wikipedia now uses NoFollow for external links

Wikipedia now uses NoFollow for external links

This is bad news for people who used Wikipedia to get free incoming links from highly ranked web pages on the internet (we at TechWhack have met such people in the past).

Wikipedia is now using the nofollow attribute for all the external links from the English version of the open source encyclopedia.

The nofollow attribute was introduced sometime back to stop the links from getting credited by the various search engine spiders.

From now on, any external link on the English Wikipedia would feature the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

This big step has been taken by the people behind the project to prevent spammers from misusing the popularity of the website.

However, experts do believe that this step would not stop people from continuing their practices to add-on their own links which might or might not be relevant to the topic.

The nofollow attribute was originally designed for blog comments/trackbacks/pingbacks. However, a lot of regular websites have started using this feature to avoid losing their pagerank strength to other sites.