Wikipedia Backlinks: How to Get Them Honestly (and Why They Are Nofollow)

Every external link on Wikipedia carries rel="nofollow", and has since January 2007. Wikipedia's own guideline on external links says, in as many words, that adding your site "will not help with search engine optimization". So the honest version of this guide starts by telling you the thing most guides on Wikipedia link building leave until the end. Then it covers what the links are still worth, which is more than nothing, how to earn one without being reverted, and a route that begins with a domain Wikipedia already cites.

A backlink is a link from a page on one site to a page on another. Wikipedia has millions of them pointing outward, most of them in the reference lists at the bottom of articles. How backlinks work covers what a link does for the site receiving it. This guide is about the Wikipedia case, which is unusual.

Do Wikipedia backlinks help SEO?

Not directly, and Wikipedia says so itself.

The history is on Meta-Wiki's nofollow page. Google announced in January 2005 that it would respect a rel="nofollow" attribute on links. MediaWiki added it as a default anti-spam feature. English Wikipedia turned it on outside articles first, then "On January 20, 2007, it was activated in the main namespace at the request of Jimbo Wales." The same page states the current position plainly: "Currently, external links on all Wikimedia wikis are tagged with rel="nofollow"."

Wikipedia's external links guideline draws the conclusion for you: "adding your website to Wikipedia will not help with search engine optimization, because Google and other search engines ignore links on Wikipedia. In line with Wikipedia policies, you should avoid linking to a site that you own, maintain, or represent".

One nuance. Google's 2019 change to link attributes moved nofollow from a directive to a hint: "All the link attributes—sponsored, ugc, and nofollow—are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search." A hint is not zero. It is also not something anyone outside Google can measure, and Google has never said Wikipedia links are treated differently from any other nofollow link. Plan as if they pass nothing.

Why do people still want a Wikipedia backlink?

Because a link from Wikipedia is not mainly a ranking signal. It is a citation, and citations do three things a nofollow attribute cannot switch off.

Readers click them. A reference on a well-read article sends real visitors, and those visitors arrive because an editor decided your page supported a claim. For a small specialist site that can be the largest single referrer.

Answer engines read them. The data on AI search citation sources puts Wikipedia at nearly half of ChatGPT's top-cited sources. Systems that lean on Wikipedia that heavily also see what Wikipedia cites. A page that a Wikipedia article uses as a source is a page those systems have a reason to trust, and that is a discovery effect, not a link-equity effect. Our guide to AI citability and expired domains goes into what makes a domain a plausible source in the first place.

And a citation is a verdict. Wikipedia's verifiability policy requires that "All quotations, and any material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, must include an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the material." The reliable sources guideline says articles "should be based on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". A site that clears that bar and stays cited for years has been vetted by people whose only interest was whether it was accurate. That is a signal other sites, and other editors, act on.

How do you get a backlink from Wikipedia without being reverted?

There are three ways that survive, and they share one property. In each one the link is there because the page deserves to be cited, and the editor who added it, or kept it, had no stake in your site.

The first row is the only one that scales. Publish the kind of page an editor reaches for when a claim needs a source: a primary dataset, a specification, a dated account of something that happened, a piece of original research with a named author. Editors search for sources when they write, and a page that answers "where is the evidence for this" gets cited by people you will never meet. It is slow. It is also the entire reason Wikipedia is worth citing from.

The second row is the one most guides describe as "broken link building", and it is worth reading Wikipedia's own rules before trying it. The link rot guideline says: "In general, do not delete cited information solely because the URL to the source does not work any longer." And it explains why there are fewer dead links to replace than there used to be. For years, InternetArchiveBot has been repairing dead references automatically with Wayback Machine copies. The Internet Archive reported in 2018 that "9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the Wayback Machine", and that it archives "nearly every URL referenced in close to 300 wikipedia sites as soon as those links are added or changed". So a dead reference is usually already an archive link, and the claim it supports still stands. Swapping it for your page is only legitimate when your page supports the same claim at least as well, and the edit says so. Wikipedia has a project page devoted to catching the other kind, which it calls dead link spamming.

The third row is what the conflict of interest guideline asks of anyone with a stake. "COI editors are strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly, and can propose changes on article talk pages instead." Propose the source, say who you are, and let someone else decide. Slower, and it works more often than people expect, because a good source with an honest note is rare on a talk page.

The last two rows are the ones the spam guideline covers: "Adding external links to an article or user page for the purpose of promoting a website or a product is not allowed and is considered to be spam." Paid editing has to be disclosed under the Wikimedia Foundation's terms, and the conflict of interest guideline notes that "Anyone editing for pay must disclose who is paying them, who the client is, and any other relevant affiliation". A "Wikipedia backlink service" that does not mention any of this is selling you a link that will be removed and an account that will be blocked.

Which expired domains already have Wikipedia links?

There is a fourth route, and it is the one we can speak to from our own data. Some of the sites Wikipedia cited have since shut down. The reference in the article is still there, pointing at a domain that expired, and the domain is registrable.

In the Revised directory, roughly 4 in 10 of the 12,000 or so listings have a link from Wikipedia among their sources. These are domains that already dropped, where we verified the inbound link in our Common Crawl index, screened the archive history, and re-checked availability. The Wikipedia source hub lists them, with the referring-domain band, archive timeline and TLD visible before you reveal a name.

Two honest caveats, since the point of this guide is honesty.

The link is nofollow, like every other Wikipedia link. What you get is the citation and whatever discovery follows from it, not a ranking signal.

And the citation only survives if the page it points at comes back. InternetArchiveBot exists precisely to replace dead references with archived copies, so a domain that sits parked will, sooner or later, have its Wikipedia reference rewritten to a Wayback Machine URL. The way to keep the citation is to rebuild the cited page, saying what it said, at the URL Wikipedia points to. That is the same rule Google's expired domain abuse policy applies from the other direction, and rebuilding an expired domain's website covers how to recover the old page structure from the archive.

Before revealing anything, run the name through the backlink checker to see the exact Wikipedia page and anchor, and the expired domain checker to see what the cited page was about in each era of the archive. If the domain's last two years look nothing like the years Wikipedia cited it, the citation is probably already gone.

FAQ

Are Wikipedia backlinks dofollow? No. Every external link on every Wikimedia wiki is tagged rel="nofollow", and English Wikipedia has applied it to articles since 20 January 2007. Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a directive since 2019, but has never said Wikipedia links are an exception.

Is it worth getting backlinks from Wikipedia? For referral traffic and for being visible to systems that read Wikipedia's references, yes. As a ranking signal, plan on nothing. The value is that a citation marks your page as a source an independent editor trusted.

Can I add a link to my own website on Wikipedia? Wikipedia's external links guideline says you "should avoid linking to a site that you own, maintain, or represent", and the conflict of interest guideline asks you to propose it on the talk page instead. Links added directly by their owners are usually reverted within hours.

Can you buy Wikipedia backlinks? Services sell them. Wikipedia's spam guideline says adding links "for the purpose of promoting a website or a product is not allowed", paid editing must be disclosed, and undisclosed paid edits get the link removed and the account blocked. You would be paying for a link with a life expectancy measured in days.

How do I find websites that Wikipedia links to that have expired? Wikipedia's own category of articles with dead external links is one route, though most dead references have already been swapped to archive copies by InternetArchiveBot. The other is a directory that starts from the link graph: the Revised Wikipedia source hub lists dropped domains with a verified Wikipedia link.

If a domain that Wikipedia already cites is what you are after, browse the directory of expired domains with backlinks, start from the Wikipedia source hub, and read the archive timeline on each listing before you reveal a name. The citation is only worth having if you intend to put the cited page back.