Wikipedia puts the “no follow” tag in all outbound links
I find it quite amusing that Wikipedia has done a wholesale negation of all of its links because of an SEO contest.
For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about (and who really does?), SEO (search engine optimization) success has a large deal to do with who links to whom. Getting a reference link from an authority makes search engines improve their view of that website. For instance, anyone wishing to land a decent job has to provide references. Strong professional references from a known authority help validate any claims in one’s resume. The same is true for search engines.
When a respected authority website such as Wikipedia links to another site, it essentially is casting a vote in favor of that website. However, since Wikipedia (notice the lack of link!) is frightened that SEO ’spammers’ might wrongly influence the links of their authority website, they put a barrier up so that NO ONE can have an outbound link that can be seen by search engines. A few bad apples certainly ruined a good thing. In my favorite terminology of SEO professionals, Wikipedia now prevents the passing of ‘link juice’ by putting a link condom on all of their outbound links. Actually, it’s more like a site wide vasectomy.
What does this mean for SEO? It’s another hot romance gone cool. It means that Wikipedia is no longer a valued link - at least while it’s juice channel is severed. Beyond this simple bit of defensive maneuvering, what implications does this have for SEO in general? In my opinion, the value of the outbound link has been elevated and made more rare to acquire. There’s gold in them there links!
Google says that it’s good to have a link from Yahoo in it’s guidelines. Yahoo charges $299/year for that link. Get the picture? This is just another sign that another revenue stream is being blown wide open. SEOs need links to succeed. Authority sites are reluctant to give away those links. But everyone has their price. Yahoo’s price is $299/year.
Certainly people go to great lengths to acquire links that look “natural” to the search engines. We have already seen a surge in the creation of directories that charge a “review fee” for links in the past few years. (Google justifies links otherwise known as “paid” when a human has to spend time “reviewing” the site before adding the link. So, replace “paid link” with “a link requiring a human review” and it gets better favor from Google.)
What I believe we will see in the near future is a surge in the development of authority topic sites that sell clean links to SEOs for the link value rather than for the clickthrough traffic (the traditional PPC method). With the recent launch of companies such as text link ads which sells ‘clean’, SEO friendly links based on monthly or yearly rates rather than clickthrough rates, linking is becoming a growing revenue stream in the competitive SEO landscape.