Nathania Johnson posted some very interesting stats on SEW yesterday to show how Wikipedia’s traffic has grown 8,000% in 5 years due to search referrals. This is an unbelievable statistic but as mentioned in the article that’s what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1!
There’s a mixture of opinions but many SEO’s would agree that Wikipedia shouldn’t appear in Google’s top 10 for searches on nearly every piece of content they have. I think it depends on the specific search term, but in my opinion Wikipedia provides little value when ranking #1 for searches such as SEO and restaurant. Most people performing these queries would be looking for somewhere to eat, or looking for SEO advice, blogs or tools. If they wanted to find a definition a “what is …” or “define:…” query would have worked fine.
Lets take a look at the results for a Google search on holidays:
Surely people know what a holiday is!
And how do you think Wikipedia would perform if they used Google AdWords?
I would imagine an ad like this would be lucky to get a CTR of 0.1% with a low quality score, but it’s not a problem in the organic listings.
Google has become by far the leading search engine because it gives searchers what they are looking for, and there is an argument that Wikipedia mixes up the results to provide a different type of listing, I agree with this to a certain extent but in all reality it’s nowhere near being the most relevant webpage for any of the above searches. Although not all of it’s rankings are unfair, if you search for a footballer, for example, you get quality content and stats from Wikipedia which deserves it’s ranking at the top as it’s useful to the searcher.
How can Google’s algortihm change to prevent Wikipedia’s SERPs domination?
In my opinion the Google algorithm should pay less attention to the strength of wikipedia.org as a whole domain, calculating rankings based upon the inbound links to a specific page instead. If your content is of a higher quality and more relevant to the actual search term this should be out ranking Wikipedia, but how do you compete with 5 million links?
These rankings would be completely different if the algorithm considered that only 2,000 inbound links are relevant, probably less when you consider no-one should really be linking to this! :)
What do you think, does Wikipedia rightfully deserve most of it’s rankings and provide searchers with the information they are looking for? Or is Wikipedia irrelevant for many search terms and ranking far too highly?
lmao @ Wikipedia “What is a holiday” advert
Interesting post Kevin. I have to agree that I can’t really see the benefit of Wikipedia ranking #1 for queries that are obviously more transactional than informational.
It’s interesting that you mention how Google could change the algo to sort this out; I suggested exactly the same thing in a post explaining how Google could turn Knol into a Wiki beater if it really wanted to.
Good post. The adwords example really makes the point.
On one hand I agree that Wikipedia controls the SERPs on many keywords in which they are not the best site. I get kind of tired seeing them there too. The problem is based on Google’s algorithm they do deserve that ranking. While the information may not be best there is for every subject they do have a lot of content that is relevant to almost any query and they keep all of their link juice within the site. I think they provide relevant information although in many cases it is not nearly the best information available. Relevancy is not really the problem. Domain level authority and trust are though. I don’t think I would have a problem if Google lowered the aging/authority factor on its algo but Wikipedia is doing such a great job with their SEO I am not sure that would even make a huge difference.
It might hurt a bit but since every article is linked to so much by other websites many of their articles would still dominate. If more and more webmasters stop linking to them and take the time to link to better resources it would go a long way in loosening their grip at the top of the SERPs.
Oh come on, this was said like… 10 times this year already?
Hello there !
One day, google took the decision to raise wikipedia.org in search result. The idea is really simple to understand :
most of the time wikipedia got good enough content for users.
When I am querying “SEO” in google.com, I actually want to know what the acronym mean and a brief explanation. Getting the wikipedia article as a first hit suits my need and thus I am an happy google customer. That will make me come back to their site.
Try searching for SEO on msn.com …
This is ridiculous. In your holiday example, the Wikipedia hit will be much more likely to have what a searcher wants than any of the other results shown. Four hits trying to sell you a cheap holiday (when the fact that it comes up first in google with a keyword-laden page trying to sell you something should be an indication that they’ve worked hard to game google and probably don’t actually have the best deal), vs. Wikipedia, which is a good starting point for the wide range of other information someone looking for “holiday” might want (e.g., a list of holidays, the date of an upcoming holiday, legal or policy information about business holidays, etc.).
With a vague search term like “holiday”, it’s tough to predict what a searcher is looking for, and no single result is likely to satisfy more than a fraction of searchers.
It’s clear in this case, though, that for almost every searcher, 4 hits for cheap flights and packaged vacations is either 3 or 4 too many.
In the U.S., my search results for “holidays” look nothing like the ones you show. The top two results are holidays.net pages (not bad, especially the second one, a list of 2008 holiday dates), then Wikipedia, then a U.S. federal holidays page, then a Google Calendar page, then travelzoo (with cheap flights!). That’s actually a pretty good coverage of the range of the information I expected searchers would want before I did the query.
Yeah, this wiki stuff is waaaay getting old folks. Enough already. Sage is correct. Read that post again. Another poster above is also right. It’s the algo at work so deal with it.
Isn’t there anything else to blog about in the SEO industry? It seems all there is is twitter stuff, social media stuff, and wikipedia stuff these days. Sheesh. LOL
It’s important to keep in mind that Wikipedia has never lifted a finger to make its content Google-friendly … they ranked us highly. The result of this for Wikipedia has been sufficient popularity to cause the servers to nearly melt under the load ;-)
The best way to combat this is to become a better page on the subject than the relevant Wikipedia article. Googling “currency conversion” still comes up with xe.com at #1, for example; Wikipedia’s not in the top 20, despite the perfectly good article.
Wikipedia’s rankings are not fair at all. Most of the time I skip over them when I’m searching