All outbound links from the English language Wikipedia Site now include the nofollow attribute, meaning that these links should no longer count in the search engines’ search result algorithms.

Search Engine Journal reports that as of now are all outbound links from the English Wikipedia Site using the nofollow attribute, no exceptions.

The nofollow tag was developed by Google to stop the increasing amount of comment spam in blogs and online discussion forum.

The tag tells Google (and other search engines that observe the tag) that it should not give the page linked to any boost in search engine rankings as a result of that link.

As most of our readers will know, Google uses link popularity and the quality and authority of inbound links as one important part of its ranking methodology.

Given that many spammers believe that the nofollow tag has such an affect, many of them may stop spamming the Wikipedia after this.

We are not so sure the search engines will actually stop taking Wikipedia-links into consideration in the future. Wikipedia is one of the Web heavy-weights, authority-wise, and in general a link from Wikipedia is a strong sign of quality and relevance, and do therefore help them in their strive to generate high quality search results.

If were running a search engine, we would ignore the Wikipedia nofollow tags.