This wikipedia thing needs to stop

i remember but forget where, it says having content similar to Wiki as good points...

 

I disagree, and not simply because Wiki can be inaccurate. Wiki is not the source of the content. This is important: more often than not, the content on Wikipedia is a boiled-down version of the information that is available on other websites.

Although Wikipedia is supposed to acknowledge its sources, it doesn't always. It's easier to judge the reliability of information if you know a little about where and who it comes from, whereas Wikipedia is written by a bunch of different people. When I search for information, I want to see the source, not some second or third-hand version of the same. Wikipedia is a solution to a problem we don't have.

 

Google has designed its Search Engine not for the webmasters but for the masses. For the masses, Wikipedia is a good tool.

 

Wikipedia is often a good starting point for a lot of the stuff I search for on the net, there is a lot of relevant info on there.

 

I dont mean to undermine your website because I am sure its great. But why dont you have all that information on your website? Espically as your a specialist in it? Even better you can be biased on your own site and increase your chances of a sale. So why do you need wikipedia to educate your users? Thats like the microsoft website educating people about its os and people go download linux..

the issue with "niche and they have millions" is that people crawled the web with google and copyied/pasted it into wikipedia. So effectivly all us millions of webmasters with single niches have effectivly built wikipedia.

If i sell bathtubs and a vietnimise guy searches for it, i want him to get to my little niche site about bathtubs which has historic references, the history of bathtubs, the legacy of my company and i consider my bathtubs to be "art" and not merly places you wash yourself, I want him on MY site, not on wikipedia reading some unpassionate jibberish about bathtubs.

I dont have a site about bathtubs, but if your pasionate about your product/subject X thats how you will feel about it.

Pierce

 

Wikipedia is a link-juice black-hole - millions of gallons of link-juice trapped forever behind the rel=nofollow event horizon.

Wiki became huge and then stopped giving back to the web what the web had given to it.

Sites that do this threaten Google's algorithm because a few big players will dominate the web by controlling link-juice. Smaller voices will, with time, find it even harder to be heard.

I'd like to see Google tweak its algorithm to give less weight to sites that link out exclusively with rel=nofollow. That way sites that spread link-juice around will be rewarded. This helps Google rank sites better - and helps web-democracy too.

 

Once we go there:
I think the whole link / authority ranking system is flawed.
Unless the Engines are smart enough to find pages all by themselves and rank them based on the quality of a content (and that requires some sort of intelligence) someone will always game the system.

As many here pointed out (correctly), wiki is not always the best result and more importantly often not the original source.
If someone researches something using your site and makes a wiki page for it, it will outrank you. You had all the work, spent all the research time and then you rank behind wiki.

 

Wikipedia should not be #1 for a television show ahead of forums and sites devoted to that show. For pete's sake it's just a single page

 

wikipedia ranks well not only because of pagerank, because its pages are the best optimized. if you want to learn ace SEO skillz, start by analyzing the source code of a wikipedia page.

by the way, when you search for something, you can add '-site:wikipedia.org" to ensure that you won't get no wiki results.

 

The only reason Wikipedia scores so high is due to all the back links that webmasters like us provide. I had written about this in my blog a while back, unless more and more of us start acting on this, they will only grow larger. www.contentpays.info/giving-wikipedia-a-taste-of-its-own-medicine/

 

I would agree that Wiki is too high on SERPs and the editors and admins are fully aware of this and they are very aware of cross linking. Thats why they have a warning at the top of some pages to get more pages linking to it.

I still think it is good to post links on Wikipedia because there are still websites which crawl Wiki and take content from there such as Answers.com, some of the articles on there can be PR 6 and PR5, so by just adding your link to Wiki, you are usually guaranteed to get at least five websites which will copy that content but include a SEO friendly link

 

Not in my experience. I suppose this only holds true for certain categories.

 

I check wikipedia directly for some of the most keyword based information.

 

I agree with you. I find them very informative. It's like having Britanica (sp?) Encyclopedia online. I love reading at the Wiki site. I haven't noticed them hogging up the search results.

 

There is no way up from #1.
I don't say Wikipedia is a bad resource and does not deserve good rankings, on the contrary.
However if someone adds content he got from my site, he should add me as a reference. Many editors don't do this. When you go there and add it yourself, you are labeled a spammer.

 

I agree & what's more, each & every one of us are allowed to contribute and/or edit. So long as you don't spam or troll the place, it's pretty rare to get your contributions entirely deleted.

It is an encyclopaedia for the people by the people. Unlike the dmoz directory which was supposed to be for the people by the people etc blah blah. Sure, wikipedia contains a lot of inaccurate information - but that's what is so cool, we can just go right on in there and correct it, if we know better.

The average surfer soon learns to ignore wikipedia se results if they 're looking for something more specific than general knowledge on a given subject. i.e to buy a specific product.

I think it's a great resource.

 

You've got to remember that Google is for the average folks out there. Most don't know what a "bathtub" is, and they need to read an encyclopedia article on it before they can do more sophisticated things.

It's an Industrial strength algorithm - one size fits all results. I think Google should devalue wikipedia to a degree - if someone wants an encyclopedia article, they can go straight to wikipedia (or World Book, or Britanica, etc).

I agree that Wikipedia is a great resource. But it is given too much credence. I have done some original research on the widgets that I am an expert in, and I published a 2000 word paper about it on my pages. Wikipedia comes along and writes a sentence on it, and that gets top billing. I try to get a link in Wikipedia, and people come along and delete the link, calling my site too commercial (I have Adsense on my pages, which is apparently a sin to the wiki-purists), not professional enough, or irrelevant!

 

They have a good technique for generating lots and lots of links for themselves ---

ANYONE can use the content of a Wikipedia page for their own website, IF they also add a LINK to the Wikipedia page.

That is probably half the reason why Google ranks it so high -- all the inbound links from the other sites who have borrowed info.

But its hardly a good indication of quality or general user preference. Many high quality subject-specific sites seem to be getting lost beneath the pile of Wikipedia and pages of info mostly copied by other sites from wikipedia.

 

Its a great resource. It has such powerful backlinks that it makes sense to rank it so high.

 

I agree that they have good internal anchor text interlinking. They also have a good PR.