This week, the Wikipedia community announced that all outbound links on its site would be appended with the rel=”nofollow” attribute. This decision has stoked an already-heated debate on the web about equality, accountability and the flow of trust.
When inserted into hyperlinks, the snippet of HTML code forces Google to ignore the linked page when judging how important it is. Google and engines like it rank pages within search results based on how trusted those pages are on the web — the more inbound links leading to a page, the higher the perceived trust, and the higher that page’s rank in a web search. Appending the “nofollow” attribute to a link essentially makes the linked page invisible (in that particular instance) to Google’s PageRank census-takers.
Wikipedia’s decision arises from the abuse of the site’s well-trusted status to falsely provide credibility, or “link juice,” to outside pages. Anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, so anyone can add a link to any page, relevant or not, and gain PageRank points.
Google first took steps to fight PageRank gaming within comment spam in January, 2005. Ever since then, the debate over the efficacy of a strict nofollow policy has been raging on Wikipedia. The community has even enforced it in the past before dropping it for a while.
Wikipedia site editors are faced with several dilemmas. They can eradicate non-relevant links by cleaning up recently edited pages, which requires a human to assess each outbound link. They could also institute a waiting period policy on outbound links, keeping them inactive for a specific timeframe or until they’ve been vetted. Both require human interaction and both are time consuming. Another issue is that a strict nofollow policy would deny link juice to credible, deserving websites.
