Also bare in mind that currently the plugin has no email flow control, so emails are being sent off in bursts. Long term it isn’t safe to have on a busy blog, unless you are running EzineArticles and the email fires off from a separate white-listed server (Chris has it nicely worked out)

I am actually seeing some strange results in the SERPs monitoring a few terms., with Wikipedia actually dropping. Maybe linking out with followable links really does help relevance of your own content much more than anyone realises (or speaks about)

Sorry for the delayed response. Mmhh.. Email notification for comments would be nice. Just a little bit user feedback :)

“If you have a system that ultimately creates some numerical data for each link, based on how long it has been there, then you can selectively have the link followable or not.”

Yes, the search engines have to determine that. If it is an on site attribute, then it will be gamed. Hello Meta Tags 1990

“I have a Wikipedia account, but have only done a few edits.
Some might argue that because I am not dedicated editor, I have no right to an opinion.”

I believe you did not grasp the concept yet. What you CAN gain by your activities is trust, which is not unimportant in a community, isn’t it?

“Relevance
By not passing on link equity to other sites, Wikipedia themselves become… irrelevant”

I don’t understand that statement. Does it fall into the category like this one? : “The code is full of bugs, which is no surprise, because it was written in basic and not c++”

“Why link to Wikipedia with a followable link? They don’t share the link equity back out”

Answer: your headline for the paragraph

I completely agree that if the search engines will obey the nofollow attribute, an imbalance due to unrealistic PageRank distribution caused by the “black hole” effect wikipedia creates by absorbing all the votes without distributing it back to the outside world, will be the result of this.

I am also sure that the search engines had somebody crunching some numbers and simulating it. I hope that the result would be disastrous, because that will trigger something else that is much overdue. You guess what that might be. I mentioned it already several time.

What is unfortunate is the fact that all the good reasons why I support the nofollow at wikipedia (until it will hopefully not matter anymore if there is a nofollow or not), is not the reason why it was enabled (again).

I hope that a lot of people followed the arguments and adopted the good reasons now too. The SEO contest thingy is no reason IMO. If it would be just that I would say “remove the nofollow NOW”.

Cheers!
Carsten

They have deliberately prevented search engines from correct attribution, using a microformat specifically designed for that purpose.
If Wikipedia really didn’t care about their effect on search, positive or negative, then they wouldn’t use a search engine device to do so.

If Wikipedia really wanted to become less influential in search results, the ideal method would be to add nofollow to all internal links, thus a page would only gain relevance based upon the relevance that particular article receives from external sources.

Why link to Wikipedia with a followable link? They don’t share the link equity back out”

One problem – Wikipedia doesn’t *care* about link equity.

Wikipedia has no advertising, it’s a charitable organisation existing solely on donations. Page Rank isn’t, therefore, important. The goal of providing access to all human knowledge, to everyone, without charge, is what matters to Wikipedia as a whole and to the hundreds of thousands of volunteers that contribute. It is nice that a Wikipedia article is often highly featured on a Google search, but it’s not essential. Nobody, certainly not Wikipedia, is forcing the bloggers to link to Wikipedia in their blogs. They do so because Wikipedia is a non-commercial copyleft resource for everyone. I am aware that this puts sand in the vaginas of the SEO people, but Wikipedia doesn’t care about that, either.