people do that in blogs and forums to avoir spam and still they have their share of spam. This move is natural from wikipedia but it is an indication that after all wikipedia info should be used with care as it is very vulnerable to spammers then misinformation.
I don't think PR is all that important, but traffic is. So this isn't a total loss for those wanting to add their links there, since there is a chance that someone will click your link.
Yes true, most of the spammers dont give a damn if their site is indexed or not, but again those spammers are easy to spot and remove from the page. What is more difficult is those commercial links that love PR because it is a long term boost.
This is a good move by wikipedia. There's no reason for spammers to try and put irrelevant links there if they will no benefit from it. I don't think this is about PR though. PR is the last thing that Wikipedia will worry about.
It may not pass PageRank ...but I have a feeling the engines will still rely on Wikipedia for determining relevancy. It is just too good of a resource.
There are few more forums on same topic: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=225344 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224044 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=225355 What look at last two digit of each url Edit: All threads are merged so, urls will not work
Yes, that's one option. link-text is important, even in no-follow links. So getting links in wikipedia with good link-text will still help your site. The other question is, will google even take this seriously? If so, that will cause a complete reshuffling of the cards in a number of niches I'm involved with.
For example I have a site about lancasterian monitorial school system and I receive about 20 visits per month from Wikipedia. It's not a lot but this topic will never be as popular as for example iPods.
I was getting around 15 visitors a day for just that link. This wiki entry ranked high for a particular search, and some of the readers followed my link at the bottom. The main thing though was that I had converted some of them. I had added a respectable and non-spammy section to the entry. I figured that entitled me to add a link at the bottom. Apparently I figured wrong. They kept my content but eventually removed the link.
The amount of visitors a wikipedia link brings is obviously dependent on the popularity of the specific wikipedia page. As for adding content 'earning' you a link - that is not how it works. The link is supposed to only stay up if it is relevant to the content of the article and the page linked to is high quality. Not saying that always works though. Sometimes it seems only the 'official' links stay up.
If you think about it, a link from Wikipedia should count as a vote for your site. Can you put up a spammy link to your site? Sure, but when the wiki community finds it, it gets removed. Overtime, the relevant links that add something to the topic are the most likely to stick around. It is a shame Wikipedia had to add nofollow to their external links.
It might be easier to make your case if you had a keyword that was a little more solid (and actually searched for)
A) LOL at the massive 4 word perfectly spelled 3 language keyword . B) As a person that actually has links from Wikipedia (and the great thing is that I was not the one that put them there) , I'd like to say that in the long run , it might even benefit the sites , since Wiki traffic is good traffic , these are interested visitors , and now that there will be less spam , the real quality sites might enjoy more incoming traffic due to less outgoing links from the same articles.
I'm in the same position as you C(J) - I also have links from wikipedia that I didn't add myself that bring traffic to sites. BUT - I disagree that rel=nofollow is a good thing because: 1. High quality sites will lose more in terms of SERPS from this action than poor sites will because, on average, high quality sites enjoyed far more linkage from Wikepedia than poor sites did. 2. I think there's a degree of short-sightedness from Wikipedia here too. They were acting as a trust-rank hub for Google. Lots of trustrank came into the Wikipedia and they sent it back out again - mainly to pages that deserved it. (Okay, not always, but nothing's perfect). Now that Wikipedia is no longer going to be such an important Trustrank hub for Google, the importance of Wikipedia may be devalued somewhat from Google's perspective.