Wikipedia Backlinks: What a Link From Wikipedia Is Worth (Nofollow Since 2007)

A Wikipedia backlink is a link from a Wikipedia article to a page on another site. Almost all of them are references, the numbered citations at the bottom of an article that support a sentence in it. Every one of them carries rel="nofollow", and Wikipedia's own guidelines say adding your site will not help your rankings. That is the answer to the question most people arrive with. The rest of this guide is about what the link does instead, which is more than nothing, and about the domains Wikipedia links to that no longer exist.

This is the explainer. If you want the method for earning a citation, how to get backlinks from Wikipedia covers the three routes that survive editorial review.

Are Wikipedia backlinks dofollow?

No. 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, the software Wikipedia runs on, added it as an anti-spam default. English Wikipedia first applied it outside articles, and then "On January 20, 2007, it was activated in the main namespace at the request of Jimbo Wales." The page states the current position in one sentence: "Currently, external links on all Wikimedia wikis are tagged with rel="nofollow"."

Wikipedia's external links guideline draws the conclusion for you. Adding your site "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".

There is one qualification. In 2019 Google changed how it treats link attributes: "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 measurable from outside Google, and Google has never said a Wikipedia link is treated differently from any other nofollow link. Plan on it passing no ranking signal.

What is a Wikipedia backlink worth, then?

Three things, none of which the nofollow attribute switches off.

Readers follow it. A reference on a well-read article sends visitors who arrived because an editor decided the page supported a claim. For a specialist site that can be the largest single referrer it has.

It is an editorial verdict. Wikipedia's reliable sources guideline says articles "should be based on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". A citation that survives on Wikipedia for years is a page that people with no stake in the site judged accurate, and kept. Other editors, journalists and researchers act on that.

Answer engines read it. The data on AI search citation sources puts Wikipedia at close to half of ChatGPT's most-cited sources. A system that leans on Wikipedia that heavily also sees what Wikipedia cites. That is a discovery effect rather than a ranking effect, and it is the reason a Wikipedia citation is worth more in 2026 than the nofollow attribute suggests.

A link index counts it too. The Common Crawl web graph, a public crawl of the web, records a Wikipedia link as a referring domain like any other, which is why a Wikipedia link shows up in a backlink checker and contributes to a domain's referring domain count. How backlinks work covers what that count measures. Reading Wikipedia as one of the named sources next to the count is more useful than the count moving by one.

What happens to a Wikipedia link when the site dies?

The reference stays. Wikipedia's link rot guideline is explicit: "In general, do not delete cited information solely because the URL to the source does not work any longer." The claim the source supported still stands, and the citation is repaired rather than removed.

Repair mostly means an archive copy. The Internet Archive reported in 2018 that "9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work" because InternetArchiveBot rewrote them to Wayback Machine copies, and that it archives "nearly every URL referenced in close to 300 wikipedia sites as soon as those links are added or changed." What is left over is tracked in the articles with dead external links maintenance category, sorted by the month the link was tagged.

So a Wikipedia dead link is not an open slot. The claim is already supported by an archived copy of the original page, and Wikipedia has a project devoted to catching people who swap those references for their own pages. The how-to guide covers the narrow case where a replacement is legitimate.

Which expired domains does Wikipedia link to?

The site behind a citation can shut down while the citation survives. When the domain then expires and drops, the Wikipedia reference points at a registrable name. Whoever registers it decides what the reference resolves to.

The count is larger than people expect. Across the roughly 11,000 listings in the Revised directory, about 4 in 10 have a link from Wikipedia among their referring domains. These are domains that already dropped, where the inbound link was found in the Common Crawl web graph, the archive history read, and availability re-checked against the live DNS root. The expired domains with Wikipedia backlinks hub lists them with the referring domain band, archive timeline and Revised Score open, and the name masked until you reveal it. The source index groups the rest of the directory the same way, by university, government body, community and press.

Two things to know before treating that link as an asset.

It is nofollow, like every Wikipedia link. What you get is the citation and the discovery that follows from it.

And the citation only stays a citation if the cited page comes back. InternetArchiveBot exists to replace dead references with archived copies, so a domain that sits parked will have its Wikipedia reference rewritten to a Wayback Machine URL sooner or later, if it has not been already. Keeping it means rebuilding the cited page, saying what it said, at the URL Wikipedia points to. Google's expired domain abuse policy asks for the same thing from the other side, and rebuilding an expired domain's website covers how to recover the old page structure from the archive. Run the name through the expired domain checker first, and compare what the site was in the years Wikipedia cited it with what it was at the end.

How do you find every domain Wikipedia links to?

Wikipedia publishes them. MediaWiki keeps every outbound link in an externallinks table, with the target domain stored in reversed form in the el_to_domain_index column so that it can be searched by domain, and that table is part of the English Wikipedia dumps. Load it, extract the registrable domain from each row, and you have the full set of sites English Wikipedia cites. Checking each one for expiry and availability is the part that takes time, and the expired domain checker guide covers the four lookups involved.

The other direction is the link graph. Query the Common Crawl web graph for links whose source is a Wikipedia host and you get the same set as seen by a crawler rather than by Wikipedia's own database, which is how the source hub above was built. Links from universities and government sites can be found the same way, and edu and gov backlinks covers what those are worth.

FAQ

Do Wikipedia backlinks help SEO? Not as a ranking signal. Every external link on Wikipedia is nofollow, and Wikipedia's external links guideline says adding your site "will not help with search engine optimization". The link is worth having for the referral traffic, the editorial trust a citation implies, and visibility to systems that read Wikipedia's references.

Why are Wikipedia links nofollow? To remove the incentive to spam. MediaWiki added nofollow as an anti-spam default after Google announced support for the attribute in 2005, and English Wikipedia applied it to articles on 20 January 2007.

Can I buy a Wikipedia backlink? Services offer them. Wikipedia's spam guideline forbids adding links to promote a site, paid editing must be disclosed, and undisclosed paid links are removed and the accounts blocked. The how-to guide covers the routes that do survive.

What is a Wikipedia dead link? A reference whose URL no longer resolves. Wikipedia's guideline says not to delete the cited information, and InternetArchiveBot replaces most dead URLs with Wayback Machine copies. What remains is tracked in a maintenance category by month.

How do I find expired domains that Wikipedia links to? Either from Wikipedia's externallinks table in the public dumps, checking each domain's status, or from a link graph queried for links whose source is Wikipedia. The Revised source hub lists dropped domains with a verified Wikipedia link, names masked and metrics open.

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