Wikipedia’s ultimate weapon against spam – rel=spam

Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a “search engine optimization world championship” contest targeting WP[1], I’ve gone ahead and switched rel=”nofollow” back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org’s article namespace.

I love this! All the hard work done by SEO specialists and spammers have gone down the drain in a single stroke! What this decision means is that getting your site on to the wikipedia will no longer help you in search engine rankings.

There are lot of clever SEO guys out there who has managed to get their sites included in Wikipedia articles. Since Wikipedia is a high pagerank site on Google, getting a link to your site will increase your pagerank and you will also get a lot of referral traffic. After this rel=nofollow change, pagerank benefit is no longer available.

Since there is no pagerank benefit, the spamming activity on Wikipedia is bound to come down. I wonder why they haven’t done it in the first place!