Using Wikipedia as an SEO Strategy is a Bad Idea
Links are Nofollow, Blogs & Press Releases are not Valid Sources
Oct 4, 2009
Unique among web sites today, Wikipedia has extremely high traffic (#6 according to Alexa) and an interface that anybody can edit. This makes the online encyclopedia very attractive from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standpoint, but the site's culture and tools make placing links nearly impossible and mostly pointless.
The policies of Wikipedia encourage the removal of even the most appropriate external links, and those which are left are tagged to prevent search engine crawlers from taking note of their existence. In short, Wikipedia's anti-spam measures make it useless from an SEO standpoint.
Use of <nofollow> on Wikipedia
Due to the interest in capitalizing on the site's unique position, in 2007 Wikipedia implemented the use of the nofollow value for all links pointing to external sites. An idea developed by Google in 2005, inserting rel=”nofollow” into an html link leaves an instruction to search engine crawler bots to disregard the link, and not include it in calculating page popularity.
The bots of all major search engines adhere to this instruction. All links leading from Wikipedia to other sites (excluding others run by the Wikimedia Foundation) include this code, meaning that the links will accomplish absolutely nothing for boosting a given page's prominence. Despite the use of <nofollow> to mitigate the trend, links tend to multiply as editors include:
- Subpages of an official site, when a link to the main page will do (for example, news.google.com and images.google.com instead of simply google.com)
- Links to several social networking sites as well as the official web page of a band or organization
- Fan sites and forums for movies and video games
- Other sites in an attempt to build a comprehensive link list, a service which the Wikipedian community does not wish to perform
Culture and Bureaucracy in Patrolling New Links
Wikipedia's policy on external links is summarized thus: “External links to an article can be helpful to the reader, but they should be kept minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article.” Editors that pride themselves on fighting vandalism or spam frequently use a very strict interpretation of this policy, and will remove virtually any external link unless great pains are taken to justify the site's inclusion in a given article.
Links are also frequently included in the inline citations used to organize references for Wikipedia articles, and these links are removed for a different set of reasons altogether. SEO blogger Rand Fishkin was frustrated by this process in 2007, when the Wikipedia entry on SEO was being developed into a featured article. Editors well-versed in the subject were citing blogs and websites of known experts in the field, only to have those references removed because they failed Wikipedia's verifiability criterion, which is nearly as misunderstood as the standards for notability.
Clearly stymied by the single-minded bureaucracy of the editors involved, Fishkin saw the process as biased against online sources, expressing frustration at “the bias towards traditional media as more knowledgeable, legitimate and trustworthy than blogs, industry resources or online-only media.”
What Fishkin failed to understand as a third-party observer is that the bulk of Wikipedia's references are from online sources, but that self-published information (in print or online) is considered a primary source, which is too close to the subject to be used in any encyclopedia. Blogs, press releases, and books printed on demand are all examples of self-published sources.
Blacklisting of Pages
Pages and sites that are the most popular recipient of spam links may be blacklisted by Wikipedia's administrators as a preventative measure of last resort. In 2006, the entire site of Suite101.com was blacklisted after writers for the site placed excessive links to their articles in an attempt to generate page views, which at the time was the key criterion for compensation.
Since that time, Wikipedia has instituted the <nofollow> protocol, and Suite101.com has switched to a compensation model based on ad clicks, but no article from Suite101 may be included as a link or citation unless an editor specifically requests that it be placed on Wikipedia's whitelist. Even with the intervention of Suite101 President Peter Berger (his comments can be seen in the above-linked discussion under username "Berger peter"), the community's only compromise was to “Let the demand for specific links drive the push to unblock.”
Although it is extremely difficult to get promotional links to stick around on Wikipedia, the community's reaction to the attempt is often harsh and longlasting, as the tiff with Suite101 clearly demonstrates.
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