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Wikipedia and SEO
Early this week Randfish wrote about the “Dark Side of Wikipedia“. Everyone knows how popular Wikipedia is, and though there will always be detractors you have to admit that it is the number online (and maybe even offline) encyclopedia nowadays. So what does Wikipedia have to do with SEO?
Being a such a popular site anyone in the world of SEO knows that getting links from something as popular as Wikipedia is very desirable to say the least. Spammers hoping to to get link juice of course immediately saw the opportunity and thus placed links to their (or their clients’) sites on Wikipedia. To combat spamming Wikipedia gave all external links (for articles in English) the “nofollow” attribute. This helps combat spammers since all links with tagged as such is not considered by Google when raking websites. Hence, SEO-wise spammers have nothing to gain by littering Wikipedia with links to their sites.
However, as Randfish pointed out, “vandalism” still does exist in Wikipedia since “vandals” for several reasons. Furthermore, he says that “Wikipedia is such a reference resource that if your site earns links on popular pages, you’ll find that those links find their way into forums, blog posts, articles, and journalistic publications more often than not. This is probably one of the most clever ways to use Wikipedia, because you’ll need to link to something worthy of being spread, anyway, which probably means that even a heavy-handed Wiki-editor won’t remove it, as it’s typically relevant enough and interesting enough to belong there.” So this means that links in Wikipedia still are valuable.
Obviously, this technique for getting “worthy links” are questionable (downright offensive to many). So you might as well ask yourself, unless the link on your site really is important to an article, should you just ride with Wikipedia’s popularity to get links? If you ask professional and ethical SEO consultants the answer will of course be NO.
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