How does wikipedia stay so high in the rankings for certain keywords when their articles are being reproduced hundreds of thousands of times across different websites via feeds, etc? Shouldn't they be getting nailed for dupe content?
If anyone would get nailed it would be the people scraping the content. Google, etc. try to determine who was first and give them full credit.
Yes, and apart from that, almost all of the mirrors out there have a link back to Wikipedia so that helps keep them high.
It seems that there is a manual filter allowing Wikipedia to rank well for its pages. Try typing in a keyword ad adding "info" This will normally get Wikipedia results.
Makes me wonder if google is eyeing a wikipedia takeover/purchase/aquisition - not sure how that works with it being a non-profit, but if google has the will, they'll find a way. It would be a good fit with google.
With close to 185,000,000 pages indexed in G, it all boils down to internal links contributing to high ranking of certain keywords. Also, do not forget that most topic pages in wikipedia are cited as authentic reference documents in numerous web sites, including research organizations, goverment institutions, centres of higher learning and the like. All this helps.
Google has already donated server space and bandwidth for Wikipedia along with denying any "hostile" intention towards them.
It pisses me off that they rank so high for sooo many terms... especially things that they are nowhere near an authoritive resource on. It also pisses me off that no matter who releases the original content - Wiki will copy it and outrank them. The ONLY reason I haven't complained about wikipedia ever until this thread is the fact that the site doesn't appear to be monetarily targeted (yet) They should not be allowed to be considered "authoritive" for every Key Word under the sun. The site is SEO'd like crazy, and it's really not fair for a general information site to outrank a site that is targeted towards a specific niche - and really is authoritive in that niche. Basically, what Wikipedia is to me is: A collection of all of the keyword strings entered into search engines, with sub-par content attached. They have to be the second largest scraper site on the net (next to Google)... PS... why in the hell do people add information to Wikipedia for free? What is the incentive?
I've noticed a donation link in wikipedia recently! Has that always been there? They're on $163,000 at the moment! Looks like their friendship with google is making them big bucks!
Yes I am too of the view that google has some manual filtering in place for showing important websites irrespective of the number of back links they have or other lack of SEO techniques.
Well, aside from the backlinks that they receive from the people using the content from Wikipedia. There's also the tons of internal links between the pages of Wikipedia. So does this mean Google is favoring WIkipedia? Interesting
Who says it has to remain non-profit? If I was GG, I would purchase Wiki and put some neat ads in the right bar. To be honest, I don't see an ad-supported version of Wiki losing visitors while it doesn't charge for reading/participating. I mean, I won't stop using DP only because there's this ugly pink ad at the top. I think you might be right about GG sneaking for Wiki. As to the topic, I think Wiki ranks high because it has an enormous ammount of backlinks, 73,000,000 to be precise. Imagine, where you would be if your site would have 73 millions of backlinks