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Wikipedia is dominating search rankings across the board, and in more categories than any other single organization. It has really grown out of control. They literally show up for everything now (rank position #7 in Google, 4 in Yahoo, 11 & 12 in MSN for “everything”).
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9 Comments
Comments
"giving them their own special listing" What if another wiki based encyclopedia comes along that is better? I’d prefer they get no special treatment.
I appreciated the idea; also would prefer not to see Wikipedia in the top ten results all the time. I often search for Wikipedia articles in other ways - so I don’t need to see the results in search engines.
SPAM = site positioned above mine. This is one of the weakest submits I’ve ever seen on Sphinn. Will SEOs please stop whining? If you can’t outrank Wikipedia wtf can you outrank?
If they treat Wikipedia differently, either removing it from the results (what for) or giving it a special listing, it’ll open a path for similarly authoritative sites to go this way. Do you want your authoritative site to be removed from the SERPs, just because it’s too good and ranks across the board? Do you want your competitors to complain about you to Google?
Wikipedia is a terrific resource. It beats the crap out of ODP and remember when ODP used to dominate the SERPS? Then the domain spammers came along. Now we’ve got Wikipedia to beat and so be it. I’d rather be outranked by Wikipedia than www.my-dogs-porno-with-the-neighbours-dog.com any day. Oh and half - please don’t lump all SEOs together as though we have one collective brain. Some of us think for ourselves you know.
A couple of questions: 1. Why does the author of this article assume that Wikipedia has been given some special "authority" by Google? 2. Isn’t it possible, and more likely that the pages that rank well on wikipedia do so because they are better SEO’ed than other pages that they outrank? BTW, they also rank (3rd) for nothing.
"Oh and half - please don’t lump all SEOs together as though we have one collective brain." Kalena, my bad. I don’t really believe all SEOs think alike. I’m just a little fed up with reading post after post complaining about things that aren’t going to change.
"Do you want your authoritative site to be removed from the SERPs, just because it’s too good and ranks across the board? Do you want your competitors to complain about you to Google?" This about sums it my feelings on the matter. I don’t know about everyone else, but when I search for something that I need information about, and a Wikipedia result comes up, it usually contains the information I was searching for. Let’s not forget the core purpose of a search engine.
The problem isn’t Wikipedia - it’s seriously well referenced, and that’s pretty much what the algo’s taking into account. At least Wikpedia mainly sticks to single listings, though, unlike certain other sites (ebay, and a raft of classifieds sites) which are gumming up the SERPs with subdomains. IMO Wikipedia listings offer a choice to users - but subdomain spamming seeks to take away that choice. 2c.