Wikipedia SEO Strategies: How Wiki Links Affect Your Google Ranking?
Wondering if linking to Wikipedia affects the ranking score of your web page? Yes, it does! With Wikipedia ranking for the majority of search terms, you can see the power it owes without doing any research. Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites that carry a lot of weight with Google. As per Alexa top 500 global sites, Wikipedia is the 5th most used website worldwide.
Wikipedia has gained huge popularity and is useful for both on-page and off-page SEO strategies because it allows users to create or edit content. It lets businesses to create Wikipedia articles for their clients and incorporate their site links within the content. But, why would businesses want to include their links in Wikipedia?
It is simple, quick and probably one of the fastest ways to get a backlink. Being an open source community, anyone can make the changes on the site. With Google giving significant importance to links within Wikipedia, the marketers began to spam links. That’s why Wikipedia changed the links from do-follow to no-follow, which means it has implemented no-follow value for all back-links to its articles.
Wikipedia’s Do-Follow to No-Follow Transition
As now you know, Wikipedia started using its no-follow link policy to combat spam and discourage marketers from using the site for a variety of promotional purposes. In this concept, web spider programs will not be able to crawl the link into its search engine index by adding a certain meta tag to an HTML link. No-follow links can contribute to improving brand visibility and building link diversity.
Since all the external links in Wikipedia are coded with the no-follow value, the back-links are not able to promote the target websites. Despite web-crawlers of all major search engines follow this no-follow attribute, Google still gives weight to links from Wikipedia. It doesn’t seem to affect the value of links and site spamming by people in an attempt to boost page rank score.
The Boomerang Effect of Wikipedia Links
As Wikipedia pages rank high in search, it causes what is referred to as the boomerang effect in which no-follow links in Wikipedia seem to gain more weight from Google. A link present in a high ranking Wikipedia article also brings the references along with it. This may increase the rank of links with low page ranking from the rank and weight of the Wikipedia article.
How you can leverage the benefit of Wiki boomerang effect for your business? Here are a few smart and easy tips:
- Creating a Wikipedia article and inserting links within it is a great way to help your page rank higher. Having external links from Wikipedia to your site also helps in boosting your page rank score.
- Adding links to your site and to press about your site also help. If your service has been mentioned by a major publication, you can add a link to the relevant article in Wikipedia. This will help keep the press higher about you in search results for online users to view.
- Planning to use Wikipedia as your digital marketing strategy? Hire an SEO expert of the best digital marketing agency. Creating articles and building links on Wikipedia requires expertise and knowledge of Wikipedia strategies to prevent from being spammed. To avoid your site getting blacklisted in Wikipedia, hire the best SEO specialist.
Use of Wikipedia for SEO Strategies
With increasing popularity and visitors to the site, Wikipedia turns out to be an ideal tool in SEO strategy. Whether you are planning the keyword strategy for your website, looking for content ideas or searching ways to establish trust for your website, you can use Wikipedia for both on-page and off-page SEO strategy in the following ways.
Wikipedia for off-page SEO — Here are a few actionable ways to use Wikipedia to earn winning links for everyone.
- While Wikipedia links are no-follow, they can get you referral traffic. Grab broken and citation needed links to get the referral traffic and a no-follow link from the most trusted sites.
- Since Wikipedia pages are often the most useful pages for broad keywords, look for link opportunities with topic pages.
- Take all the URLs of all the citations in a relevant Wikipedia article and plug them to have a bigger list of interested people, blogs, and sites.
- Research Wikipedia guidelines and work with an experienced Wikipedia editor to build a well structured Wikipedia page for your business.
Wikipedia for on-page SEO — When you are planning content or keyword strategy, using Wikipedia for on-page SEO is helpful in the following ways:
- As Wikipedia already ranks for many keywords relevant to a given topic, you may gauge the interest for that article.
- Do keyword research and keyword planning with Wikipedia.
- Create content through dead links, citation needed and stub pages.
- It is good to plan your piece of content around reference pages.
If you are planning to use Wikipedia to create a unique SEO strategy, work with our professional SEO Service Experts in Denver at Colorado Digital Experts. Our SEO strategists can help you boost your Google site rank score with many white-hat unique strategies. Contact us today to learn more.
