"Shut up!"... "(wikki wikki wikki wikki)"...
First, props to anyone who remembers that song. Mark my words: breakdancing will be back someday.
Second, thanks to Jeannette in NYC for reminding me about this recent Wikipedia change. My POV:
Wikipedia is an awesome site, oozing with content and domain trust. Engines have always had a great appetite for it virtually since its inception, and hence for a while now, yes as a place to get links it's been coveted by SEOs and besieged by spammers.
That they've now made all their external links forced-NOFOLLOW is no shocker. Things had gotten to the point where, to counter the vigilance of their Link Nazis failed writers proudly unsupervised Deletionists splendid editors, spammers and non-spammers alike were sicking cron jobs on Wikipedia in order to make links stick (links that automagically reappear every hour/night if/when removed have a way of wearing out humans eventually... Mercilessly fresh!). 
However while I expect this will deter some, it won't deter the more experienced who have made a habit of trying to learn the various dialects of Googlespeak. Several seasoned SEOs believe the NOFOLLOW standard is misunderstood, being as much a social engineering move as a technical one. In other words, Google wants the world to dismiss such links as useless for natural ranking, but behind the scenes clicks on them still count towards getting good relevancy credit under certain circumstances... like when they come from users with Google Toolbar installed for example. That the West Coast G is quietly watching and applying all kinds of data via such means is 99.99% certain, as they'd be foolish not to. I recall all the way back to SES '05: Rand's eloquent take on it was "Evil, evil, evil!" 👿 and he wasn't the first to have taken that stance.
Formally Yahoo sells advertisers behavioral targeting options. Google offers users Personalized Search options, and doesn't sell advertisers behavioral targeting tools... yet. If/when they do make an official play for that turf though, what would be their competitive advantage against Yahoo's version; what would inform their product to give it an edge? Yahoo's been gathering scary gobs of data about what you, me, and everyone else on the Web does for longer than Google has. A crux of Google's brilliant strategy: Yahoo tried to be the Web's premier destination site, the cool club to hang at. Not Google, though. On their domain it's "get in, get out," but pay attention to the Web at large and it becomes obvious they're everywhere pimping ads... (BTW if anyone has any estimates on how many Adsense ads are out there for every YPN ad, please do forward). As for MSN, well they've tried to be just about everything over the years. It's part of why they're still way behind the search game.
Google gathers all kinds of data about people in many ways, for different reasons. Aside from if/when using their Toolbar, any time we're logged into Google accounts and/or have their cookies on our machines, our actions help inform their business (tiny bit by bit, cumulatively). Consider those ads popping into our Gmail - ever eerily at least somewhat on-topic for whatever a viewed thread is - to be a hint of things to come. They may not be collecting personally identifiable information but certainly the CTR they have to measure there could serve more than just setting CPCs for advertisers. Those Blogger accounts all now "upgraded" to Google accounts? Yep. Google Analytics? Fine for White Hat if one (and/or one's clients) can entrust data with Google without flinching, but a potentially fatal misstep for n00b Black Hats.
Sidebar: The idea of constantly aggregating, analyzing and leveraging data is a cornerstone for Google. They live and breathe it, culturally, strategically and tactically applying it to many parts of their operation... just like all the rest of us in the search business, and more power to them for it after all. It's not like they don't make kick-ass stuff technologically, despite how many of us have love/hate relationships with what being Googley seems to be sometimes. (For example, one hiring trick they've seemingly long used has been to consciously keep want ads posted for up to years after respective positions have been actually already filled. Enabled via auto-responders, self-running online interviews etc., the ruse is one of the ways they try to be always pinpointing who and where the world's top talent is. Their files are always getting updated in this way, in case of growth and/or departures etc.)
These details should be noted regardless of whatever Google formally offers advertisers in the coming months/years or not. Among other things, they've refined the art of making the complex look and feel simple while sprinkling in a few mindfucks along the way because they can. This is why in working with them simplicity is often a good way to look back upon their actions, through assumptions at the least, or even healthy paranoia perhaps (depending on the nature of one's projects). There are even certain Firefox extensions for SEO work that are preferred over others which have been found to leave unwanted footprints.
Despite whatever technical truths of the moment lie behind NDAs at the 'plex, Wikipedia's NOFOLLOW defense will probably quiet things down initially at least. It will not however, become a definitive silencer.
As of now are all outbound links from the english Wikipedia Site using the NOFOLLOW attribute, no exceptions. No matter where you place it, Article Page, Talk Page, User Page, Project Page, whatever. No Link will get any credit at the major search engines.
- Search Engine Journal
Meh. It was Google as opposed to a neutral entity that invented NOFOLLOW, and their market share depends on their index staying more relevant than the other guys any way it can, so reading between their lines means there's more to it than that. Bots ignoring links is one thing, credit and how to get it is another, and I doubt the two are in such a cleanly monogamous relationship. Normally, under certain conditions inbound NOFOLLOW links probably still help relevancy scoring... and even if not they sure as hell don't hurt traffic anyway!
Don't Believe the Hype!
