Is Wikipedia Monopolising Google Results?

Those of you who regularly use Google to find what you’re looking for on the web (and to those who don’t - where have you been the last few years?) may have noticed how a Wikipedia article nearly always shows up somewhere on that first page of results.

Not long ago an experiment was done to get a measure of just how powerful Wikipedia pages are in Google results and the results were quite surprising. Of the 600 Wikipedia articles chosen, a staggering 580 (97%) showed up on the first page of search results for their titles.

To be fair, a lot of times the article will be highly relevant to what you’re looking for and should rightly be where it is found in the SERPs. On the other hand, at what point does Google want to go from being a strictly impartial search engine to effectively a middleman for Wikipedia?

I suppose the other thing you can take from these findings is just how much weight the phrase “Content Is King” holds in Google’s algorithm. So to all you webmasters and blog writers… get writing!

Rik
SEO Programmer

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