For those of you who missed the big news Sunday & Monday, all outbound Wikipedia links are using a NOFOLLOW tag, which basically means they will not pass Google PageRank / Google Juice and should no longer have effect on search engine rankings (although they will still be indexed by some search engines as backlinks).
Some bloggers and Wikipedia editors feel shafted by this, as in essensce, Wikipedia was created and is run by free volunteers has established its credibility and Google dominance due to millions of incoming links to Wikipedia material.
Once such blogger, Andy Beal, has launched a campaign to try and reduce Wikipedia’s PageRank to Zero via web publishers changing all of their existing natural links to Wikipedia into links which also include the NOFOLLOW tag.
Will this work? Nope. But, it’s a valiant effort and maybe, just maybe, such action could generate more of a public argument on the use of NOFOLLOW outside of blog commenting.
More from Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim:
Until Wikipedia realizes that its popularity (and link value) has only come about because hundreds of thousands of lowly webmasters linked to the site without using the NOFOLLOW tag, I plan to include NOFOLLOW on any future links to Wikipedia and will display the above logo on my site as a battle-cry to rally others.
Wikipedia is all powerful, because the masses made it that way. Send Wikipedia a message and display either this sign or your own! (above)
