“Do not use Wikipedia. It is unreliable.” All through high school and even in the higher grades of elementary school, every time there was an assignment that involved research the teacher would constantly remind the class those unforgettable words. If it is so unreliable then why is it such a popular website? Haven’t you always noticed that Wikipedia is always one of the top links in all searches? Its because with Google’s support, Wikipedia constantly appears whenever a search is conducted on Google Search, which has helped it to acquire over 300 million readers worldwide. Many digital marketers use this popularity of Wikipedia to boost their clients’ businesses. There is more to Wikipedia than just a reference source that teachers used to, and still, disapprove of.
What makes Wikipedia so desirable to digital marketers, such as ‘Legalmorning’ and ‘Colorado Digital Experts’, has to do with the concept of PageRanks as we learned in class. As of now, tens of millions of links are in-linked to Wikipedia, which in turn gives the website a very high PageRank, since we know that a page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. Because of this, many people are able to exploit Wikipedia by creating a Wiki article with an out-link to their own website. This is very useful as that website would obtain a percentage of the votes from Wikipedia, where even though that percentage is probably extremely small due to the sheer amount of out-links from Wikipedia, it would still be significant and help their website by making the link more important and likely to be included as part of Google search results.
An example of this (as described by https://blog.ispionage.com/wikipedia-affects-pagerank.html) is when “Luck of the Legion” is searched in Google, the website DanDare.org shows up and is above even Amazon in terms of PageRank.
This was because, in Wikipedia, an article about “Luck of the Legion” had a reference to a page in DanDare.org. By associating with Wikipedia, the websites that are referenced become part of top search results because of how the PageRank algorithm works, which is very interesting to me.
Its also because of this that digital marketers find that Wikipedia is very profitable for them. They can use Wiki to embed an out-link to their client’s website within new articles they can create or into pre-existing ones. By doing this, they claim that by including their clients’ link within Wikipedia, it can help to improve their clients’ PageRanks, which is likely to be true.
It would be great for digital marketers or any companies wishing to improve their exposures to help increase their businesses to just link with Wikipedia, but it may not be that simple. Wikipedia had implemented a no-follow policy for certain links to help discourage the website from being used by people to market their products. Yet, even these links that have the no-follow tags to them still have some importance during a search though not as much as the do-follow links. There are also rules and certain standards that a Wikipedia article must uphold to which makes it even harder to be linked with the website. There are companies offering to create Wikipedia articles for clients by promoting Wikipedia’s ability to increase their PageRanks.
In my opinion, even if a Wikipedia article was perfectly written and had all the needed out-links embedded within it, it doesn’t necessarily mean there will be an improvement in business. Considering there must be millions of Wikipedia articles on the internet, then the chances of having a particular article showing up in the results especially on the first page are pretty slim. If the article is hardly accessed then the PageRank for the backlinks may not increase. Yet, Wikipedia appears to still be a popular site by which digital marketers can increase the PageRanks of out-links and thus promote their clients’ websites.
As an aside, even giant companies, such as YouTube and Facebook, plan to associate with Wikipedia, which implies that these big businesses consider the website to be reliable. They want their users to have a reference source to access in order to verify any content that they encounter on their sites.
Relevant Links
- https://blog.ispionage.com/wikipedia-affects-pagerank.html
- https://medium.com/@coloradodigitalexperts/wikipedia-seo-strategies-how-wiki-links-affect-your-google-ranking-2fb0d2e034ad
- https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-google-youtube-facebook-support
Reference List
Colorado Digital. (2019, July 2). Wikipedia SEO Strategies: How Wiki Links Affect Your Google Ranking? Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://medium.com/@coloradodigitalexperts/wikipedia-seo-strategies-how-wiki-links-affect-your-google-ranking-2fb0d2e034ad.
Maher, K. (2018, June 15). Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-google-youtube-facebook-support.
Wood, M. (n.d.). Pro SEO Tip: How WikiPedia Can Affect Your PageRank Score. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://blog.ispionage.com/wikipedia-affects-pagerank.html.
This is actually quite an interesting post – especially how Wikipedia uses the no-follow policy. There seems to be quite a competition between PageRank algorithms and people trying to ‘game’ the SEO.
For example, in the past you were able to spam HTML header tags with hundreds of random, marginally related terms, and that would help the SEO algorithm determine if your website’s content would be relevant to search terms. Later, it was just putting transparent (usually white) text at the bottom of your web page so it “reads” as content, but is completely unrelated. Now people are playing the PageRank algorithm by using Wikipedia to farm links to their own site. Fascinating, I wonder what the next strategy to ‘play’ the SEO algorithm will be.
Thanks for sharing!