As most of my readers have probably already heard elsewhere, wikipedia recently reintroduced their nofollow tag on outbound links to try and prevent spam from SEOs.

Secretly, I believed this might have been a bit of a trick and that wikipedia was a large enough site that they might have gotten in touch with Google directly and informed them that they were putting on a nofollow tag to dissuade spammers, but that perhaps Google should (unspokenly) ignore that tag.

As always in SEO, you can never really be sure, but I think that today and yesterday the discounting of wikipedia links caught up to me in a very real way. The site I’ve mentioned on this blog in the past–that I started on October 1st and that was getting around 1,500 to 2,000 uniques daily–had a fairly limited number of IBLs. Maybe 500 or so, but they were good ones and the site is a genuinely useful, good site. I think we had 12 Wikipedia links at last count, all valid and longstanding, based on contributions we had offered.

Yesterday, however, our traffic from Google was literally reduced to a third of what it had been before. Simultaneously, we got some of the best links I’ve ever attained in all my days of SEO. I wish I could brag with these here, but I just don’t feel comfortable posting URLs, etc. on an SEO blog I’m sure you understand. Anyway, the only reason I could possibly see for this very dramatic reduction in traffic is either an algo change or, in my opinion more likely, the impact of Google’s recognition of Wikipedia’s new nofollow policy. After all, 12 PR5+ links from an authority site like Wikipedia, with valid and helpful anchor text is a pretty significant contribution to a site with only 500 or so unique IBLs.

Of course this is all anecdotal and theory, as always with SEO, but it seems to me that it’s the only variable that changed and also that it happened just when I would expect Google to have had time to recrawl and recalculate the Wikipedia links. Food for thought. Please let me know if you’ve had similar (or contrary) experiences!