Is it possible to use heavy referencing to Wikipedia articles on my site? Basically just copy and lift but provide a link back? Will this help at all? Or should I just subtly rewrite the Wikipedia content? Im trying to get a lot of content down for SEO and general content. Thanks.
Its illegal if you use their article even with a link back.. And also they will be of no use according to SEO SO better re-write them
I personally don't trust Wikipedia as a source of information. Ever since I saw an article that included "I have a massive [expletive]" I've decided they aren't very reliable.
Hehe, Its not strictly 'lifting' I dont know why I used that terminology. Its more descriptive captioning of certain items I want to have dispalyed. I would use maybe 100 words of a large article on about 10 items and link back, but apparently thats not permitted. Thanks
That is not true, you should read the copyright notice allowing you to use Wikipedia's content. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights What you can't do is attribute yourself with the authorship of such content. Agree, because everybody can edit such content, the sources are not 100% accurate or reliable.
Material appearing on wikipedia is public domain. Yes it is a good idea to give attribution and to cite the soruce if you use it but you are not legally obligated to do so because it is public domain. I do agree with others who said that there is no SEo benefit to using their content word for word. Your page will be very likely to be marked as supplemental by Google. In my opinion the only good use of Wikipedia is for short citations and to help with gathering research for a write up. As far as re-writing goes, I have hired several writers in the past who simply reworte what wikipedia had and it wasnt very pretty to say the least
I guess it's absolutely legal but can't help you for your SEO purpose because it won't be unique! Read this under all wikipedia pages: All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Also: 2. VERBATIM COPYING You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3. You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and you may publicly display copies.
For SEO purposes copying a wikipedia article is just about worthless. New sites especially can't expect copied articles to rank in google. Using a quote from wikipedia and giving the article your own spin is a better way of doing it.
Anyway I think the best way is to read the article from wikipedia and re-write what you got from that in your own way (or hire some people to do that) It won't take that time and it's effective for SEO as they will be unique.
Why not just get some private label rights articles from some site or some free offer and rewrite that? Why use Wiki.. that has been crawled so much.. you will get double content penalties?
Another strong argument to avoid Wikipedia - it is constantly crawled, that's for sure and will probably get you in great trouble.