Comments on: Wikipedia SEO – Are Their Google Ranking Fair?

By: The Trouble with Wikipedia as a Source for Medical Information « Laika’s MedLibLog

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:40:35 +0000

[...] The extreme high traffic to Wikipedia due to search referrals has even been been denounced by SEO-people (see here) [13]: if you type “holiday” Wikipedia provides little value when ranking in the top [...]

By: Can You Name a Location Where Wikipedia Doesn’t Rank in Google’s Top 10? | Webbyn.com

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:05:20 +0000

[...] top 10 and most of these were infact top 3. Wikipedia’s domination in Google has caused some interesting debates in the past, but I’m quite surprised they dominate for so many of these terms. In my opinion [...]

By: Can You Name a Location Where Wikipedia Doesn’t Rank in Google’s Top 10? | SEOptimise

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 08:41:14 +0000

By: Purity Rings

Purity Rings — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:15:12 +0000

Wikipedia’s rankings are not fair at all. Most of the time I skip over them when I’m searching

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:04:16 +0000

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.

By: Doug Heil

Doug Heil — Sun, 18 May 2008 03:27:06 +0000

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

By: Sage (User:Ragesoss)

Sage (User:Ragesoss) — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:45:04 +0000

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.

By: Hashar

Hashar — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:48:47 +0000

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 …

By: Favorite Browser

Favorite Browser — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:32:23 +0000

Oh come on, this was said like… 10 times this year already?

By: Mark Pilatowski

Mark Pilatowski — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:39:15 +0000

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.

By: Frances

Frances — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:24:11 +0000

Good post. The adwords example really makes the point.

By: Ciarán

Ciarán — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:09:42 +0000

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.

By: Gavin Mitchell

Gavin Mitchell — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:06:10 +0000

lmao @ Wikipedia “What is a holiday” advert