: Linking to Wikipedia. What’s the impact on SEO? I have a content generated site and I am planning to write a tool that data mines the content and links it to relevant articles on Wikipedia

@Murray432

As per the link from John Conde's answer, the impact would be positive, according to www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

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@Heady270

Wikipedia doesn’t send a 404 status for deleted pages, so your automatic checkers for broken links will not find those pages.
Broken links may hurt your reputation, they will hurt the user experience. I still haven’t found a solution for this bug. Usually I avoid links to Wikipedia for this reason.

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@Sarah324

Linking out to relevant sites is never a bad thing and may possibly help your rankings (source).

The only time linking to another site may hurt you is when the site is considered by Google to be part of a bad neighborhood (sites that are created to crosslink themselves and boost their ranking or ranking of a main site). By linking to them you are essentially telling Google you are part of that bad neighborhood . (It may take more then one link to do it by why risk it?)

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@Murphy175

It doesn't hurt anything. Linking out to authority sites, such as Wikipedia, is a good thing to do. I don't think it helps much, if at all, ranking a site but it does make your site look more 'realistic', especially if you're generating/aggregating content in some way.

I'd make the Wikipedia links nofollow as sort of a quid pro quo since they nofollow all of their external links.

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