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Wikipedia Traffic Since Adding Nofollow
April 23, 2007
Many have wondered what effect it might have on your site's search traffic to tag nearly every outbound link with the "nofollow" attribute. According to Alexa, Wikipedia hasn't suffered. Looking at the following graph, with the red vertical line showing the rough date on which Wikipedia added "nofollow" attributes to its outbound links, one could draw the superficial conclusion that a global "nofollow" addition has had neither particularly positive effects (i.e., the "PageRank hoarding" theory) nor negative effects (i.e., the "if Wikipedia doesn't trust its links then Google won't trust Wikipedia's pages" theory):
While this graph supposedly reflects all traffic, Hitwise suggests that Wikipedia gets over 50% of its traffic from Google. So theoretically, a large hit in Google traffic would appear on this chart.
It might be more accurate to look at Wikipedia traffic from the source itself. Pulled from this page (a very cool resource), we see a traffic graph (measured in bits/sec -- not visits or pageviews) that similarly confirms no traffic loss following the "nofollow" implementation:
An interesting footnote: This graph shows incoming traffic (e.g., new articles, picture uploads, comments, etc.) below the X-axis (the red horizontal line near the bottom), while outgoing traffic (typical file requests, etc.) are above the X-axis. It's very cool that they show this.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at April 23, 2007 02:16 PM
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» SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 23, 2007 from Search Engine Land
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across [Read More]
Tracked on April 26, 2007 09:10 AM
Comments
To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't have expected Wikipedia traffic to drop simply because an outspoken group of SEOs demanded adding nofollow to Wikipedia links simply because Wikipedia is no longer passing trust to outside sites.
More and more people are becoming web savvy. More and more people who don't understand the nofollow debate are linking to Wikipedia. Because of the trust on the Wikipedia domain both from a Search Engine perspective and from a user perspective, it would be very difficult for Wikipedia to lose its rankings and its visitors.
Posted by: Tamar Weinberg at April 23, 2007 03:59 PM
Yeah people look at Wiki for info they don't care about nofollow attributes and most users will not know what it means. I had a link from my web site www.buyingcheap.com.au up on Wiki for a while - it didn't have an effect on my PageRank score but it had a great impact on my site traffic.
Posted by: Gareth at May 13, 2007 09:19 PM
yeah… those stupid wiki’s!
wonder what happen if we all use nofollow to them?
Have a good one.
Posted by: SEO at July 22, 2007 01:37 AM
Of course wikipedia will not suffer from the implementation of nofollow tag. It is the users of wikipedia that add links to it that will not get the benefit.
Posted by: Philippine Website Developers at May 1, 2008 03:29 PM