nofollow in WIkipedia has absolutely no SEO perks?

Maybe not lying to webmasters, but underhanded? Now that's a different story. If they'll do this with politicians, and ultimately to citizens, how do you know they're not lying to you. Just because they say so??

 

I think people will still spam it. I think all installations of wordpress have nofollow in comments but I still receive dozens of viagra and propecia comment spam every day

 

I thought the point of SEO was traffic, as what's the point of being on page one of the SERPS if you don't want people to click into your page...so traffic should go hand in hand with any SERP/SEO discussion. At least as I see it.

As for an SEO perk, Wiki results often get the top rating in the SERP, which is an aspect of SEO, on that first listing, having a link to your page can not be a bad thing. I know I often hit Wiki pages for my research and often will check out the external links. I've joined several forums from stumbling upon their main pages in WIKI, and have followed several ads once I passed through WIKI.

Ultimately, there is MUCH more to SERPS and SEO then PageRank and the first goal of either should be traffic...

With the new nofollow within WIKI it should change the attitude of SEO'ers, not in ignoring Wikipedia, but rather changing the focus on it. Wiki is huge, has a monstrous following, and likely a rather large click through rate. I'd count external links from important keywords as my version of getting on page one in a SERP, or at least a semi-equivalent. Many people pay good money for ad placement on sites with traffic like WIKI, external links there are free, generally permanent, and are relevant to the topic at hand. Getting listed in Yahoo or Alexa does not help your PageRank (directories excluded) so on some level why should getting Wiki?

Either way, properly placed wiki links will bring in traffic, especially to a site with good keywords in the domain name or to newer site in the sandbox or similar. I mean, heh, if you can't get page one, at least get a link from the first stop in the SERPS.
Q

 

I'm assuming that you're responding to my post: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=2520813&postcount=38

You are absolutely right...the purpose of SEO is definitely traffic. All of your points are valid in the aspect of building traffic to your site. Dead on. I just am going back to the original thread post which was about SEO perks.

 

what's a wikipedia? is it like an encyclopedia?

 

Google it.

Col

 

To be more specific, traffic from SEs via organic searches. I don't need to tell this but traffic from traffic exchange is, for example, useless as we all know.

But "SEO=more traffic" is still weak. Sometimes people do SEO for the sake of SEO, forgetting about ROI.

If your ROI is not imporving, you may want to find a better advertising/marketing method instead of SEO.

 

I'd agree to this move by Wikipedia. We get traffic not only through rankings but clicks on our links from visitors who frequent this popular site.

 

I noticed this today in an interview with Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz

 

got backlink from wiki but no PR goodness ......dam no follow!!!

 

That is absolute rubbish.

A nofollow link CAN and DOES help in regard to SERPS. If you had read the thread, I have MANY nofollow backlinks counted by Google. I got good serps not too long after I placed those links. A nofollow doesn't mean it's a bad link. It means you're unsure about the link. Google will still follow the link, AND crawl the site. I know this as FACT because I set up a domain and put nofollow links on a few of my frequently crawled pages. Guess what? Googlebot was in that site's logs.

If you want to get technical about it.... I have backlinks from A LOT of PR5 sites that scrape the link from a site that has nofollow. On the PR5 site there is no nofollow. Want to tell me I don't benefit from that?

How many times is this that you have contradicted me and been wrong, Webgeek?

 

I know the feeling. Just don't give up..

 

I thought I read a study recently that proved that if a link is already indexed, then some weight is passed, regardless of the nofollow.

That would mean that the nofollow only stops new sites from benefitting

 

Have a link to it? In respects to PR I think that is the case, but not an absolute. From my understanding, nofollow just means that the website owner is not "vouching" for the link. Google will still crawl it, and may deem it to be a "trusted" site.

I still strongly believe that you get some level of benefit in respects to serps.

I think a more extensive experiment is in order.

I have a few domanis that have a bit of age on them that are parked. I wonder what will happen if I dropped nothing but nofollow links with some obscure, zero compete anchor text, and optimize the site for said obscure keyword. I think it would be worth trying this with a free site also, like blog.myspace.com/obscure-keyword.

I know Google crawls nofollow links... why would that happen if Google really does treat it as "worthless". Seems that would be a big waste of resources.