Wikipedia and Nofollow - How I did SEO for UN

At the turn of the year 2006, Wikipedia introduces Nofollow on all its outgoing links. Nofollow means that search engines should not count the value of the link. Essentially, they shouldn’t follow it. The powerhouse that Wikipedia had been in the link profile of many very serious websites simply stopped existing.

In early 2007, I was contacted by International IDEA, which runs a project together with, among others, UNDP. This relatively new consultant, looking somewhat startled, gets to visit the office that occupies the entire island of Strömsborg (Google it and you’ll recognize it). It turns out the site, ACEproject.org, a kind of handbook for those wanting to start democracy in their country (I’m simplifying a bit) had 22,000 links from Wikipedia.

At that time, there was some talk that links from Wikipedia still counted despite the nofollow attribute. Those who said that were wrong. The drop in traffic for ACEproject was massive. Now, Google has said more recently that nofollow can be ignored, but I have yet to see a proper study showing whether the situation has actually changed.

Losing all those links from Wikipedia (the site was cited in countless articles) was a huge blow, and the bulk of the traffic they had previously been able to rely on disappeared overnight.

We solved the situation. There was no lack of opportunities for strong authority links. For example, a letter (in paper form) was sent to member states simply asking them to link. The best link that turned up was probably a front-page link from Canada (the country), and beyond that came a long series of similar links. A large batch of links from various UN bodies also helped.

Combined with a bit of on-site tweaking, we managed to reclaim the positions and climb somewhat in the search results. In recent years, I’ve unfortunately not kept track, it’s been a long time since that project was carried out.