Wikipedia Spam Resulting in Google & Yahoo Penalties

October 18th, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor

Even though Wikipedia uses a NoFollow attribute on their external links, if you spam Wikipedia results, your site can end up in a penalty in both Google and Yahoo search engines. That is, according to Search Marketer and Wikipedia volunteer Jonathan Hochman.

In a recent article in Forbes which covered the Wikipedia discussion at SMX Social, Hochman told Forbes.com’s Andy Greenberg:

Wikipedia keeps a ’spammer blacklist’ and shares it with several search engines… Domains that appear on the list often lose valuable search engine traffic.

I have not heard of this before, nor had John Carcutt who informed me of this quote from Mr. Hochman.

Have any other readers witnessed or heard of this penalty?

It seems that the sharing of spam information on Wikipedia should be somewhat irrelevant to search engines, especially with the use of NoFollow.

• And how does one make the Wikipedia Blacklist?
• What constitutes one as a spammer to Wikipedia?
• Via automated spamming of external links, spamming of resources, or my editing of Wikipedia content?

The rest of the article is pretty amazing, especially:

Comedy Central’s director of enterprise marketing, Don Steele, Wikipedia has been a godsend. One of the network’s shows, South Park, has spawned more than 250 Wikipedia pages.’Wikipedia is one of the largest traffic drivers to ComedyCentral.com’

But what about this Wikipedia, Yahoo and Google spammer blacklist?