Comments on: Why Wikipedia Dominates SERPs

By: Internomie

Internomie — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:14:05 +0000

SEO’s I think are mainly jealous of the great way that wikipedia distributes linklove, linkjuice or how you call it.
I hate that you can’t get any linkjuice or linklove from them too but I respect the way that they are optimized to rank so high in the SERP’s for basically every word in every possible language.

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:23:43 +0000

I guess, everything you said here is true. It doesn’t seem to be fair to take everything and give nothing instead. While it seems to be normal to link back to a useful and related information the other part considers that this was the best way to proceed. Well, guess what, I totally disagree with this ideea, in fact I hate it, but stop this is not everything. What happened to me was that somebody posted an article about X Product even he was not the developer of the X Product. The X Product became very popular and I also wrote a full and detailed article and visited the Wiki page and I posted my Link to References section. Somebody deleted my link, I posted back and after 10 times I stoped. It seems to me that somebody controls what he was read and tries to bring the traffic only to his website/s even if sometimes the subject has nothing to do with the Wiki article. So, Wiki is bad and the rel=nofollow attribute should be present on all articles that points to wiki. That’s just my oppinion.

By: Leo

Leo — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 08:03:34 +0000

“the ability of meritless and sometimes empty Wikipedia pages to outrank pages with better quality content.”

This statement is, which is true, sheds some light on some common misconceptions. For one, anyone who preaches that ‘content is king’ will quickly (for some people it takes a while) change their mind when their top notch quality content is ranking behind a crappy wiki page. Of course this is not meant to imply that wiki is built on crappy content. It’s not. It’s a great site. But, content is not king and this example is a classic one that proves it.

This also tells us that having a keyword in the url is not critical to ranking. It matters of course but it is not critical. Look at how many number one position wiki has and wiki wasn’t even a keyword until they became wiki. lol.

So I guess the lesson here is that links are king. Am I wrong about that?

By: David

David — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 07:04:32 +0000

Hi,
I think wiki pages annoy SEO marketeers but many people looking for info trust it and I know many who use it for almost everything.
I have heard over the last few years that wiki is not accurate and I hope someone will create some evidence for these claims as that would be fun.
With regards to link juice I think SERPs has so many factors that noone should set rules and believe they hold true throughout googles algos.
For example I think google have probably downgraded links from bookmarking sites by now as they are spam prone.
Possibly nofollow and dofollow are ignored in equal measure by google today depending on topic and many other factors.
I like wiki but I am baffled at how quickly pages are made.
If someone obscure hits the news today by the morning they have a wiki page!
Amazing.
Great article and I love your ethos and site.

By: Google's Top Search Engine Ranking Factors

Google's Top Search Engine Ranking Factors — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:50:24 +0000

[...] in high places, indicate a belief that this factor is more important now than before. However, the dominance of Wikipedia in SERPs is a powerful [...]

By: lorna

lorna — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 07:22:29 +0000

Hi David,

Point well taken. I think what many SEOs gripe about is Wiki's lack of 2-way link love. While contributing content is one aspect of participating in a community, we also hope to be rewarded with additional link juice for our time and efforts.

I wonder if a link spam tool could've taken care of the link spam, without completely neutering Wiki's ability to share link juice.

Lorna

By: Computer Guru

Computer Guru — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 05:02:40 +0000

Brilliant article, I couldn’t have summed it all up better myself!

Just to clarify something: using the no-follow plugin does not give you higher link-juice; it just treats Wikipedia the way Wikipedia treats us. We can only hope that enough people do this to affect their SERPs and, in the end, get them to undo their no-follow for all outbound links.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:57:23 +0000

This isn’t quite the case – putting nofollow on outgoing links did in fact see a notable drop in linkspammers creating pages filled with only their links. So it was worth it from our viewpoint.

The essential point SEOs miss is that helping SEOs has nothing to do with what Wikipedia does or why it does it; they’re not our constituency at all. Wikipedia is written by its editors for its editors and readers, to make something that’s useful to readers and that creates content that can be reused by others; SEOs are a third party demanding Wikipedia help them get in good with a fourth party, Google. SEOs will be helped by Wikipedia precisely as far as that contributes to the mission of writing a free content encyclopedia.

It is also useful to note that Wikipedia doesn’t lift a finger to raise its popularity or search ratings – its popularity is entirely from word of mouth. And its massive popularity is, in practice, a massive pain in the backside – it costs a fortune to serve a top 10 site without ads, and being at the top of every Google search means a lot of stuff (biographies of living people in particular) need harsh constraints on their content because they have to be not-awful right now, meaning we don’t have time to take our time and get things just right. It’s all a tricky one.