Is (over)use of "nofollow" some seriously bad mojo?

Sinking like a stone in the ocean...

[balam]

In the thread announcing the new "nofollow" attribute [webmasterworld.com] it was discovered the Wikipedia had nofollowed their OBLs. I mentioned (message #126) some SERPs for a term I rank well on, and how a Wikipedia article on the term was fairing. Here's an editted quote from my post:

There's a single search term which returns about 4800 results (at Google). While I haven't SEO'ed for the term, I'm the fourth result. This page of mine is linked to from a Wikipedia article [...]

Around two weeks ago [about January 7] I did a search on the term, and IIRC, the Wiki article was on the second SERP [...]

After today's [January 21] revelations [...] I redid my search. The Wiki article is now 24th in the SERPs [...]

I've been keeping an eye on the SERPs for the term, and after the better part of three weeks I thought I'd offer an update.

Google now reports there are 4600 results and I'm still in fourth place. The Wikipedia article has plummeted to 386 and shows no signs of slowing down.

I know a single example doesn't indicate a definitive answer, so does anyone else have any info to add? martingale, how are things going with your site [webmasterworld.com]?

[ryan26]

I'd say that it's way too early to tell. However, I would suspect that the activity that you are seeing has absolutely nothing to do with the nofollow attribute.

[pmkpmk]

I "smuggled" one of my keywords to Wikipedia, but without adding a link to it (it would be too obvious). Since it first appeared in the SERPS, it's constantly at #5 (my site is #1 and #2, our main competitor #3 and #4).

I mostly put the keyword in in order to create brand awareness. My goal is to get the first page of the SERPS completely full with results featuring the brand name. And it IS on topic with the article, though the article would be a good one without the keyword too.

[lammert]

I did a normal search on Google and found a wikipedia page without snippet and without cache. I then did a site:www.wikipedia.org search and saw there are only URL-only entries left for wikipedia!

A result of the nofollow tag on all their pages, or just part of the Allegra Google update? Very interesting also: I have one outgoing link on my site that I marked nofollow, all other outgoing links are without this mark. Although my site is daily re-indexed by Google I saw that this page with the nofollow link wasn't spidered in the last few days. Just a coincidance, or is Google using the nofollow tag backwards? I.e. every page with one or more nofollow tags is suspicious? Was nofollow just a way to identify heavily SEO optimized sites more easily?

[pmkpmk]

Hmm... "my" wikipedia page is still there. It even moved to #3, while my competitor dropped to #4 and #5. And it is the full result, including snippet and cache.