Unofficial FAQ on Wikipedia links

Seeing all the questions asked concerning links on wikipedia I thought it would be nice to translate and revise an old entry I made in a Swedish seo forum on Wikipedia. Feel free to comment and help improve this unofficial FAQ on Wikipedia links.

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a free on line encyclopedia where anyone can contribute by writing and editing articles. See: www.wikipedia.org for more information.

Why would I want a link from Wikipedia?

According to most SEO experts Wikipedia is considered (by Google and other SE's) to be an authority site (of high rank). A simple query for some extremely competitive terms such as “seo” or “mortgage” will show Wikipedia pages on the top results. Being an authority site on such a level means that Google will literally give high rankings to pretty much anything they put up.

Rand Fishkin from Seomoz claims Wikipedia has more or less become the new DMOZ due to its status with Google. He writes:

The benefits of having a link on Wikipedia are thus:
a) A great amount of Wikipedias pages are receiving nice amount of traffic which could mean a visitor might: [search for your keyword] > [Find a Wikipedia article on the results] > [Find your site through the external links on that same wiki page]. This is an indirect way of getting traffic, this by using a third party to do the work for you.

b) As mentioned earlier the must lucrative part with getting links on Wikipedia is not the traffic it generates, albeit but because of the status it carries with Google and other SE's. Getting links on Wikipedia will make Google trust you more and you may see some positive changes in your SERPs.

If anyone can edit the articles I suppose I could just add a link to my site, right?

Well, yes and no. Adding the links is really not the problem but keeping them is. You see Wikipedia have lots (and I mean lots) of editors who go around all day deleting irrelevant/spammish links. See the article on SEO (the history page) just by skimming through you will notice how often links get removed.

Well then how do I keep the links?

This is the difficult part and it demands some work from your side. First of all, never ever try to just put your link under an already created topic in hope of keeping it even if it's related -IMO-. Experience show that keeping such links is very difficult, although it must be stressed that it's not entirely impossible. Instead I would recommend you to:

a) Find the most general term for your niche. If you are selling free range eggs for instance I would say go to the article on “eggs”.

b) Search through the page looking for any “red links” you may find. These are links that go to wikipedia pages which have not yet been created. Do you understand what this means?

No I don't, what does it mean?

It means that you can/should create this page and then add your relevant link(s) under the external links, this will inevitably increase the chances of it staying there. If you sell cat food and you write a wiki-article on cat food it's not very wise to have a link point to a sales page, rather point it to a informative page discussing different cat breeds digestive systems (or the like).

Make sure the page is free from excessive advertising (in my opinion free from any ads) or anything that triggers the feeling “this guy is trying to make me buy something” feeling.

Are you saying that the link has to be free from ads?

There is no -to my knowledge- page in Wikipedia that says “all external links must be ads free” (this would actually be contradicting, I'll explain why...) but unfortunately we do not abide under such idealistic circumstances.

Way too many wikipedia editors seem to have lost all their sense of logic, you will find a huge number of these ignorant editors deleting all external links that have any ads on them even if they are strictly related to the article. This while forgetting that the New York Times, Washington Post and others have thousands of links coming in from wikipedia even though they are filled with ads hence it would be contradicting if Wikipedia demanded the sites/pages to be ads free.

Stay on the safe side, make the page ad-free and then make the ads free page point to the sales/adsense page or what ever you want it to point to. Remember that the biggest reason for doing this is not for the traffic anyway.

As a footnote I would like to add that Danny Sullivan, the biggest name in Search, was once labeled as a spammer by Wikipedian editors which made several SEO experts furious such as Aaron Wall, see this blog entry for example: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001894.shtml

I've heard wikipedia links don't pass any Page Rank, is that true?

Firstly, Wikipedia does not use the no follow attribute any more (except on other languages) which means that Google will count that link as a vote for your site.

Many people have still reported that Wikipedia doesn't pass any of the page rank and they are seemingly sure that Google is ignoring Wikipedia links which go to their site. Having this said, I can neither confirm or deny whether Google stops some of the PR juice from reaching your site or not. We can although be sure that Google does not ignore the link totally.

The evidence for this can be found in the following interview with Matt Cutts by Randfish, notice question #9 where Matt left option C and chose D which says:

The good news are, we are not living in Matts ideal world : ).

I am lazy, are there any easier ways of getting the links?

There are, but they are not as beneficial nor as beautiful (IMO), Aaron Wall points out these, saying:

Anything else that I should know about getting links on Wikipedia?

Well, yes to mention a few:

¤ Normally you do not need an editor to edit a site, normal people can and do remove links all the time (sometimes just because they feel like it). The good news are that this can be discussed in the “discussion” page of the article and if an editor find your argument stronger the link may stay and the page be locked from further editing.

¤ It's generally recommended to register at wikipedia before actually editing anything. We suppose links added by registered members have a better chance of making it then those by some anonymous dude.

¤ Some people are worried of having “too many links” on Wikipedia and whether Google views this as Spam or not. In normal cases this is not a problem, just take a brief look at NYT and other newspapers who have hundreds of links from Wikipedia. But if you start numerous stupid articles all the time with links pointing to your site, Google may do something to stop this spamming.

Finished. Please give some rep if you liked my post because I need it ^^

 

wow good stuff man. gud job.
dont beg for rep though its lame.
From my experience, yuo can get _Really_ good links from wikipedia (PR,6,7) but you need to give some before you take some. You need to read all the guidelines, and become a good wikipedian (well only for appearances of course lol).

 

I will beg for rep, its my right as a citizen of Shawns DP community : )

 

Yea, this is correct. An easy of doing this is by simply writing:
site:en.wikipedia.org "common spelling mistake" such as suceed without the extra c etc. Then go to the article and fix all the spelling errors. Your contributing without doing much effort : ) Terry Dean once started the "lazy affiliate" thing and I am now starting the "lazy wikipedian" thing ^^