Wikipedia SEO Strategies : Why WikiPedia Rank Higher in Google 1

As a SEO learner, one of the best way to learn is by looking at search engine optimization techniques on some of the popular and Google favored site. This will help a lot to understand what your blog is missing and how you can make your blog internal SEO better. Here we will look into Wikipedia SEO strategies, which will help you to learn more about On page SEO and you can take away 2-3 things from here and implement it on your website.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular website and you will find SEO ranking for most of the Keyword at number 1 in Google search. Wikipedia’s popularity owes itself to the website being unique, with article content that any user can edit. With a huge volume of visitors to the site, Wikipedia would seem like an ideal tool in SEO strategy, but certain elements involving its culture and policies can prove very difficult for SEO implementors to use.

Wikipedia employs stringent policies with regard to link spam, to the point that even relevant external links to its many articles at times get deleted. The few remaining links are in the form of tags to hide them from search engine spiders, which defeats the purpose of using Wikipedia as part of any SEO strategy.

Wikipedia SEO Strategies  : Why WikiPedia Rank Higher in Google
WikiPedia

A simple look at Wikipedia SEO Strategies:

Wikipedia and the Nofollow Value

Wikipedia SEO Strategies  : Why WikiPedia Rank Higher in Google

Because of Wikipedia’s peculiar characteristics making it a prime target for individuals wishing to tap it for a variety of purposes, 2007 saw the implementation of the nofollow value for all back links to its articles. This concept was a Google invention in 2005. By adding a certain meta tag to an html link, web spider programs will not be able to crawl the link into its search engine index.

If you are new to nofollow concept, refer to following two posts:

  • How to add Nofollow Attributes to any link
  • Understand Nofollow and Dofollow

This concept is virtually foolproof and the web-crawlers of all major search engines follow it. And since all external links in Wikipedia, excluding those leading to other Wikimedia websites, are coded with the nofollow value, these back links are not able to promote the websites they point to. Still, this measure did little to curb the proliferation of links in Wikipedia’s articles. People add redundant items to Wikipedia like links to sub pages of a parent website in addition to the main page’s link. Most of the time multiple relevant links are added to a single article, such as links to social network sites, fan sites, forums, and others in an attempt to achieve comprehensiveness. In most other websites these links are usually located in the links page but this feature is not available with Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s Bureaucracy and Cultural Backgrounds

In a nutshell, the policy of the website governing external links can be described as limiting any such links added to a particular article to the most reader-useful, directly relevant ones only to keep the number of added links per article to a minimum. Some of the editors in Wikipedia rigidly review contributed articles to root out spam and ensure the quality of submitted content. A few implemented these policies to an extent where it is almost impossible to add an external link to an article without it being removed, eespecially if little effort is taken to justify its inclusion.

Sometimes a contributor will add a hyper linked text in the article content as a reference citation. These citations are also frequently removed not because they are judged to be inappropriate, but because they fail Wikipedia’s similarly-confusing standards for verifiability. This usually holds true if the cited reference is a self-published piece on the subject. Examples of these are blogs and press releases. A notable incident in 2007 involved Rand Fishkin observing that the Wikipedia article on SEO had its citations removed simply because they originated from self-published sources, even if those citations are attributable to known SEO experts. Such incidents can be frustrating for article contributors.

The Practice of Blacklisting Pages in Wikipedia

As an extreme measure, a notorious website may be banned by Wikipedia administrators if it poses a significant threat as a link spammer. One such website, Suite101.com, was blacklisted by Wikipedia in 2006 when article writers for the former overstuffed their material with back links to attract more viewers. Back then the website compensated its writers based on the number of page views received.

The nofollow policy resulted from this incident, and since then Suite101.com replaced its compensation scheme to follow a pay per click model. Despite the change, Wikipedia’s verdict on the issue stands. None of Suite101’s article links may be placed within Wikipedia, not even as reference citations. Suite101 president Peter Berger appealed to Wikipedia to no avail, and afterwards the only leeway for removal of a site from the blacklist is through popular demand.

Promoting a website by attaching its links in Wikipedia is futile, as the incidents mentioned above demonstrate. Harsh policies and customs ensure that no link having the slightest hint of a promotional agenda will long survive scouring by Wikipedia fanatics intent on keeping it as a pure resource of human knowledge.

Well I’m not sure how many of you work day and night on On page SEO. But you should clearly try to imply some of Wikipedia SEO strategies on your blog to make it more SEO friendly.

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