What's the current take on links form Wikipedia?

[Mr. Pink]

Greetings,

Fairly recently, I read Chris' post about how Google changed the way they treat nofollow tags.

If you place a link to your site on Wikipedia it appears with a nofollow tag. So, since nofollow tags are not what they used to be, what is the value of having incoming links from Wikipedia, these days?

Basically, it ends up being quite a lot of work going back to Wikipedia over and over again, checking if the editors removed the link(s). So, I don't want to bother with any of that if there's nothing (or not much) to gain.

Any thoughts?

[Dan Schulz]

Personally, I still don't bother trying to add them. If somebody else wants to for me, all the more power to them. But I'm not going to waste my time editing their pages for nothing other than potential traffic.

[Mr. Pink]

Dan,

I agree with you on the issue of taking up too much time to fight a horde of "editors."

I was actually only wondering if, due to the way Google handles nofollow tags, there is any PR to be gained form having links on Wikipedia?

[Dan Schulz]

Well let's see if my memory serves me correctly. WikiPedia nofollows its links, nofollowed links don't pass on any PageRank (or so Google says), and that whatever links are on a page that don't have the rel="nofollow" attribute (and its value) won't have any PR or other weight divided among themselves from what the nofollow links refuse to forward.

If that's the case, then for ranking purposes I'd likely have to say no.

[Chris]

Wikipedia pisses me off.

I've got over 1500 links from them, none of which was added by me. They're all natural good links added by editors, but I get diddly for them.

I think in the end wikipedia did nofollow for the same pagerank retention that everyone else did, they just used that as an excuse.

I get oodles of uniques a day from wikipedia, but they've pushed me down to #2 on a lot of keywords so I don't consider it a fair trade. I hate their nofollow policy, I wish they'd ammend it to maybe allow links to eventually be dofollowed after a period of time or review.

But anyways, there will be no benefit other than the direct traffic from any wikipedia link.

[Mr. Pink]

OK, so basically, if one has a link on a highly visited page then it's worth it just to get organic traffic. But if it's just some obscure page there won't even be much of that.

I have to admit, though, that I am still a bit unclear regarding nofollow links, in general.

I remember reading an article, on this site, from which I understood that Google changed how they handle nofollow links. My understanding was that Google now follows them and if you have those kinds of links on your site, you end up leaking PR. Have I completely misunderstood?

[Chris]

You lose the PR, but the linked-to site still doesn't get it.

So instead of the PR getting retained, it gets NULL'd.

[Mr. Pink]

OK, now I totally get it! ;)

Thanks, Chris...