Wikipedia #1 for "seo"

[Kyle]

Thoughts?

As far as a timeline for when Google implemented my theories below, I cannot tell you. But it is probably some what recent.

Keep in mind, Google recently stopped people's ability to "google bomb" sites. As of VERY recently, George Bush's official page @ whitehouse.gov no longer comes up for "miserable failure". I don't think this was manually done, but more of a global algo change. Perhaps a slight tweak to the weight given to on page factors. Perhaps no more ranking for words that your page does not contain?

I believe Google may have increased the weight of your overall site's pagerank, and how it effects your sub pages. Remember years ago when just having lots of pagerank pointed to your front page allowed your sub pages to compete on major terms, even though those sub pages didnt have any targetted external links themselves? My original affiliate site, SonicShopper.com, had a PR7 at one point from massive off-topic link building. I categorized TONS of product niches generating massive traffic, and massive affiliate revenue. This died around the Florida update. Think of "seochat.com". So we don't speak in huge numbers, according to the limited results of the public Google link: checker, SeoChat has 3720 backlinks... Wikipedia has 442. Plus, they're caleld "seo chat", and have been around for quite a while. There are other major sites like BruceClay.com and SearchEngineWatch that have competed on "seo" and "search engine optimization" for years.

Even if you ignore the entire previous paragraph, think of all the pages SEOChat has about "seo". All the articles.... all the forum posts...etc. I always have held on to the basic principle, if your site is about "widgets", and every page of your site is about "widgets", this will significantly help you rank on "widgets". This might sound obvious, but I have seen lots of sites where the targetted domain is "some-widget.com", and the front page is about "some widget". Yet much of the content/sub pages are not about "some-widget", but instead mildly related topics due to a lack of specific things to write about regarding "some widget".

Now, wikipedia's article holds the #1 for "seo" and "search engine optimization".

Interestingly... if Google recently lowered the value of anchor text in incoming links, OR they increased the on page factors (both related to the "google bombing" thing), this could be an even greater bump to wikipedia.

I don't mean for this to sound like WMW rubbish, haven't slept and thought it'd be fun to start a thread like this. None of these issues matter or effect any of the strategies I implement in my websites. Keep it simple stupid works best for SEO, whatever that means anymore.

[Kyle]

Btw....I wasn't implying that having tons of incoming links to your /index page, doesnt allow your sub-pages to compete with today's Google. Just for clarification. It was just easier years ago.

[Chris]

It is an interesting situation.

The thing about Wikipedia is it is very very very well cross linked internally with targetted anchor text. Almost every instance of the word SEO or Search Engine Optimization in their entire database is a link pointing to that page.

The only other explanation I can think of is that Google is manually tweaking results.

[Blue Cat Buxton]

I would have thought that if anything Google would be worried about the predominance of wikipedia in the search results and be loooking to downplay their presence.

[Kyle]

I would have thought that if anything Google would be worried about the predominance of wikipedia in the search results and be loooking to downplay their presence.

Exactly.. at least until wikipedia is bought out.

[Kyle]

Actaully, who knows anymore what's going on.
Wikipedia also is holding #1 on MSN + Yahoo.

All of this is encouraging to really spend time writing your articles...

[KLB]

Wikipedia tends to attract massive amounts of links to all of its various pages, thus I suspect that in general Wikipedia gets a fairly high "trust" rating. This combined with a very good system of internal linking and natural links expressly for the SEO page is probably what is giving Wikipedia such a high placement in SERPs.

I've found that on my environmental chemistry site I can completely dominate some search results for a page that has few inbound links from other sites, but is well linked to by other pages of my site. The only thing I can attribute it to is the overall "trust" and "authority" given to my site because of all the inbound links other pages of my site have attracted over the years.

If a low profile site like mine can do well in this fashion, I'm not at all surprised that Wikipedia is completely dominating SERPs as with the example above. This is why I've always believed that linking to any Wikipedia page was a dangerous thing. I've always believed that linking to a Wikipedia page for the over exposed pop celebrity de jour would only hurt me when competing for search placement against Wikipedia in searches for search phrases related to my site.

[Kyle]

Well said KLB.. that's kind of what i was getting at, just didnt want to throw a hocus pocus label like "trust" rating. I do like how you used quotes on just "trust", and not "trust rating".

In the end, I believe Google has gone back and forth with determining the weight granted from incoming links pointing to different sub pages of your site, and how that influences your global rankings.

This could be a big part of fluctuations seen.

Something else to consider... what if Google modifies their system of calculating your weight based on what kind of site you are? What i'm getting at is if your content changes a lot, perhaps you don't need as many incoming links to that sub page. This would be the case with wikipedia and comment/user-submitted based content sites.

But, if your content never changes...but is still as complete as the wikipedia pages, you may need a very large number of incoming links to those sub pages in order to give you boost.

Two possible scenarios...

Imagine you have a site on cats, dogs, and fish. All three of these topics were equally competitive. All three had the same link weight. Now cats and dogs you updated daily. Fish was never updated. But because Google sees that as a whole, your domain updates its content regularly, fish still may rank just as well (or almost as well).

Or...

Google decides that because fish isn't updated, that will require more incoming links to that sub page than cats, and dogs.

In the end, I believe this is a complicated area for Google. Deciding how to properly weight your global rank.

I definitely think they have gone back and forth over the years.

[Kyle]

To use a real world example distinguishing these two types of sites... lets compare an EDU article written from like 1999 that has dominated a #1 spot since Google began...to an article written just last year, which evolves regularly, and is on a site which has large number of incoming links to its /root page.

This EDU page which hasnt changed since 1999, is holding the #1 spot because of the huge number of old school incoming links that continues to increase in numbers.

How would anyone hope to compete with this?

I think Google realizes this flaw, of pages which grab #1 and keep it. Why do they keep it? Because individual webmasters who want to link to quality sites on a given educational topic, will probably use Google and link to the top results, giving more link power to the pages which already dominate.

Anyway, I think Google has been realizing this for some time, and is coming up with various weight systems depending on what kind of site Google interprets you to be.

[Chris]

I think Google should buy wikipedia, remembe it entirely from the SERPs, and make it a Tab on their page.

[KLB]

In the mean time all web publishers would be well served by removing any and all of their links to Wikipedia. The last thing we need to do is link to our mutual 800lb competitor and make our own lives that much harder.

[Kyle]

That would actually be a good campaign.. and would be popular if executed with some level of well written content.
The.. dontlinktowikipedia.org campaign.

[Selkirk]

Wikipedia is the new DMOZ. Human editing doesn't scale. Anonymous editing creates the internet version of tragedy of the commons, which is spam. Eventually something will have to break. When the next, better thing comes along -- something that is less anonymous and takes less effort to police -- the human editors will evaporate and WikiPedia will implode into a black hole of spam. Google will deal with it then.

[KLB]

What is funny about this whole thing is that between all of the different Wikipedia languages there are literally hundreds of links to my environmental chemistry site, none of which I played any part in creating.

[Shawn]

About.com used to be the Wikipedia we speak of today. I remember years ago when About.com ranked for absolutely every term in every single industry. Howstuffworks used to be like that as well for a shorter period of time.