Flickr Follows Wikipedia and Del.icio.us - nofollow tag on External Links

Category: Link Baiting, Link Building, SEO, Social Networking

Wikipedia did it 12 months ago and del.icio.us 6 months ago and now Flickr is also following suit. Nofollow tags have been placed on all external links (links pointing to other websites). This is in response to people (spammers included) using these sources as a form of link building playground to point links from these high quality sources back to their sites in order to improve their search engine rankings.

In the case of Flickr, I can understand why they would implement this nofollow rule, however, there is still some contraversy with wikipedia doing this. Wikipedia was affraid at becoming the target for spammers who would spam their pages with low grade or irrelevant links.

However, this creates an unfair disadvantage to legitimate sites like CNN or BBC for example being penalized on the same level as lets say a PayPal phishing site or an illegal Viagra site. Wikipedia implements the same policy for all “we don’t trust you so you get the rel=nofollow tag….sorry!)

This is quite a unfair really, as search engines would see Wikipedia as the actual owner of the content and therefore would rank their pages higher in organic listings even though the content source is actually from another “credible” site(s) . The content is of course re-written and professionally edited so there is no change of penalty for duplicate content. Athough, there is theoretically nothing wrong with this, it is just unfair as Wikipedia is not returning any SEO value to the original publisher and the worrying thing is that this is occurring on a fairly large scale as Wikipedia is no babe.

I just thought I would point this out in case some of you out there thought that getting your links on these sources could help your rankings. At the very least, you may get some traffic from the links as I see with quite a few of my sites which are listed in Wikipedia.

Source partly obtained from www.labnol.org