When setting out on any search engine optimisation campaign you should always look at what sort of sites are ranking highly in Google for your given keywords. More and more you will find that Wikipedia will be ranked in the top 10 for virtually anything you can think of. Just to prove this I selected a handful of random words and saw if the search results in Google produce Wikipedia within the first 10 results.
| Search term |
Position |
| real estate |
2 |
| think |
10 |
| tank |
4 |
| fish |
4 |
| fan |
5 |
| popular |
6 |
| nasa (in tribute to my new mouse mat) |
9 |
| seo |
1 |
| bertrand russell |
1 |
| lunch box |
9 |
If you want to get to the top spot for any of these search phrases you will need to compete with Wikipedia to at least get onto the first page. So why is Wikipedia so popular? Here is why I think Wikipedia is so prevalent on the internet.
- It is popular. A recent study showed that 36% of online American adults use Wikipedia regularly, this number being as high as 50% for individuals with at least a college degree. The very reason why it is doing so well is because people use it, rely on it for information and (more often than not) link to it when they are trying to explain something.
- Google sees Wikipedia as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom in the world. Seriously though, Google really loves Wikipedia. If you find it ranking at number one for a search term it is almost impossible to beat it. This is because Google treats Wikipedia as an authoritative domain and will therefore give more credence to pages within it. This links back to the first point when you start to look at why it is an authoritative domain. It is an authoritative domain in Google because is it popular.
- The phrase "content is king" didn’t come about by chance. Wikipedia currently has over 12 million pages in Google’s index so it is no accident that the site is treated as an authoritative site. Additionally, not only is there lots of content, but this content changes from time to time and can keep up to date with current affairs. This changing of content only adds power to Wikipedia.
- Wiki-Jacking is a relatively recent concept, the term being coined by Rand Fishkin from seomoz.org. The idea is that you take a term you want Wikipedia to rank highly for and link other pages (the stronger the better) within Wikipedia to that page, making sure that you use the search term as the anchor text. You will find that your term will quickly rise up the rankings in Google. This is, of course, not a very nice thing to be doing I consider it a very black hat technique. If you do want to try it you will find that Wikipedia will be permanently glued to the number 1 spot for the term so you had better be careful of the term you chose. However, it does prove how important internal linking is to a site as all you do here is link from other Wikipedia pages, there is no external linking involved.
Can we do anything about Wikipedia? Probably not, but you can learn by example. By creating a content rich, well linked (both internally and externally), authoritative site you might in with a chance of beating Wikipedia for a certain search term. But it isn’t going to be easy.
Phil
Programmer, Research and Development
