What I mean is this: Search for keyword 'Roof' in google The first result is a page from wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof Now this result is number one in a search result of 123 million!! and if you check the number of backlinks for this page, its JUST 5!! Why is it number one?
It does it on the strength of it's internal links - it's in a ridiculously strong position where anchor text links from within wikipedia itself are enough to get it to the top position - seomoz did a video about it a while ago. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-wikiwikiwiki-whack And I have said before, and I'll say it again - if Google really wanted a level playing field whereby sites got top position purely on relevance and quality, it would put pressure on wikipedia to nofollow all internal links
Google has always placed importance on wiki pages and the low number of backlinks doesn't create an issue at all.
Ive also heard that if wikipedia is first its a strong indication that the search term is not a buying kw - which would be true for roof: now how to hurricane-proof my roof would be a different matter
1. internal links with the anchor text from wiki pages 2. Authority of the domain 3. User generated content with good moderation
Authority Do note that its not "no backlinks" which stops a page to rank, a page can be on TOP if there are no page competing with it.
Pagerank value of Wikipedia is 9 and Google places it into the frontpage. This is because of popularity of Wikipedia.
"if Google really wanted a level playing field whereby sites got top position purely on relevance and quality" Quality is decided by the people. And wikipedia is a very very very good representation of the people. It's extremely high quality because it is not commercial. Extremely.
Wikipedia is a trusted domain. The articles are decent and they don't try to sell anything. So instead of improving their algorithm, Google just decide to play safe and rank Wiki always high
I actually checked and it doesn't have 9 backlinks. It has 48 google backlinks. Most of these are PR 5 & 6. If you had 48 PR 5 & 6 google backlinks, then you would be high up in google. Not to mention the few thousand PR 5 & 6 backlinks counted by the yahoo backlink counter. Granted, most of these are from wikipedia itself. What does this prove: Internal links from your own site can help rank other pages of your site. So build a good link structure on your site and don't be afraid to link to internal pages as well as your homepage. Edit: Wikipedia also have nofollow on their outbound links. This may be a help.
If all sites have nofollow on their outbound links Google will be unable to rank the sites at all What does NoFollow mean? "I don't trust this site?", "This site might be crap", etc. So basically Wikipedia don't trust a single site on the Internet.
It's extremely variable in quality because any drunk with an internet connection can edit it until an (unqualified) editor catches them. And as zexy points out - it hordes it's own PR to itself, and 'votes' for no other site on the internet except itself. That's a fairly corrupt position, frankly.
If all sites had nofollow, then google would use another way to rank sites. Even now, sites aren't just ranked on inbound links to them. Use wikipedia for an example in itself. Its mostly ranked from internal pages. No follow doesn't mean "not trusted". I have plenty of links on my site that are nofollow. I trust them all. I just don't want to give them link juice because they are big companies that don't need it.