: Does Google penalize Wikipedia external links? Wikipedia external links are all nofollow, so it seems they shouldn't have any effect, negative or positive. But an article that I found online suggested

@Rambettina238

I don't think Google has been completely honest about the value/lack of value of nofollow links. A Wikipedia external link won't pass PageRank as mentioned by others, but it does appear to lend credibility to a site since Wikipedia is a trusted website. As discussed here, from a co-citation perspective there might be some value in the link.

Further, I don't know what you mean by "penalized". Google sometimes filters out the value of low-quality links such as from mirror websites. This can look like a penalty if the page they linked to was ranking before the filter (i.e. before Google caught on). Negating value from an external link is quite different from having a negative value from one.

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@Lee4591628

This is entirely a wrong info because Google will never consider rel="nofollow" attribute to the links. If you get a backlink from Wikipedia article then it would be useful to your site only because of visitor's traffic and not because of link juice or PR which means Google will never mind those nofollow links for both positive as well as negative impacts. If you get a rel="dofollow" link in an article which has mirror sites then it would surely affect your site's ranking.

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@BetL925

I don't think so. If it was the case, Google would penalize so many authorative websites.

Googlebot finds the rel="nofollow" attribute to the links and Google doesn't apply negative or positive effect for SEO.

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