Wikipedia Adds No Follow to Links
The reason given for this is to battle spam links, like those of blackhat search engine optimizers. The change is already active, as you can see by checking outgoing links on Wikipedia’s articles. (In German Wikipedia, this change was already activated for a longer time.)
Such a change in Wikipedia, with is millions of pages – many of which rank excellent in Google and have a high PageRank – has a potentially strong impact on Google search results. Google relies on links to determine its result rankings, and thus huge amount of outgoing links on Wikipedia do their share in influencing that.
Originally, “nofollow” was aimed at comment spam of blogs and such. It then entered the realms of online advertising links. It now covers wikis as well. (The attribute’s name, “nofollow”, is unclear on whether any of these applications are correct; no-follow doesn’t describe what the link is, but rather, what searchbots are supposed to do with it
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