First the boring administrator stuff - you should really use your full first name in your username or your signature. Although you are clearly acting in good faith, and your contributions are very welcome here, technically, "first initial" doesn't fit the "real names" requirement. This is mostly to prevent confusion, so that if we wind up with two people with last name Jensen and an R first name (a Roy and a Robert for instance), people don't get confused. Thanks, and now onto the meat of the post.
Wikipedia gets a lot of traffic from Google because the Mediawiki search engine is embarrassingly bad. If I want to find something on Wikipedia, I always google [WHATEVER wikipedia] instead of using Wikipedia's search engine or guessing the article name. A lot of my friends at UVA do the same.
Google actually downrates pages with too many links, and thanks to deliberate software tweaks, links from Wikipedia to anywhere
use "rel=nofollow", which
stops Googling from giving weight to WP's outbound links.. (We have not discussed a policy with regards to this, but I believe it is enabled by default, I'll check it out later).
What really benefits WP in terms of search results is when blogs link to Wikipedia pages to provide more information on peripheral topics.
