I was all ready to put together a post about the history of the wiki (from Ward Cunningham on down) and then today some news came out about wikis. Wikipedia has implemented ‘no follow’ on all links effective immediately. What this means is that the most popular wiki site is now not passing any ‘link love’ on to any external sites that are linked to. You can still get traffic from Wikipedia, but you’re no longer going to get the fringe benefits.

Why have they gone this way? Well, as SEOmoz also recently announced, there’s just too much link spam out there (SEOmoz are controlling the links on their profile pages, they’ve had the comment links no followed for a long while). People are going out to trusted sites putting links out there in the hope that they’ll get ‘link love’. This really is the fault of the search engines, they make it known that a site is trusted based on it’s links so people go out there to get links for their sites. With wikis giving anyone the ability to create their own links, it was only to be expected that people would take advantage of it, and try to get links everywhere they could get away with it.

So what will this mean for wikipedia? It’s still going to be the ‘go to’ site, based primarily on it’s popularity within Google, but it probably won’t get as much of a workout from people in the SEO community (which their editors will probably be happy with). Now there are other wikis out there (such as this one that I started using in ‘99 long before Wikipedia was on the scene) that haven’t yet implemented no-follow, but whether they’ll follow suit is something that remains to be seen.