Wikipedia Dominates Google SERPs For A Reason

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 24 of November , 2007 at 10:20 am

Giovanna Wall, wife of the famed Aaron, started posting to Aaron’s blog on November 20. That was the day of her first post. Aaron asked everyone to give her a warm welcome, so here’s mine.

I’d first like to say what a great topic she chose for her post. Wikipedia. And then the proverbially rhetorical question as a post title, “When Will Wikipedia Rank For Everything?” Funny. I thought they already had.

The part that I liked the most was the chart she borrowed from RankPulse that showed Wikipedia ranking in the top 10 for 989 out of 1,000 keywords. Then she said that she added high traffic classifiers to those phrases and found that Wikipedia’s results dropped considerably. No doubt. They probably did simply because Wikipedia is not concerned with the long tail.

But I found Giovanna’s conclusion to be enlightening as well:

My explanations for the results are:

1. Although Wikipedia ranks well for competitive phrases, they don’t belong to the associated topical communities. They rank primarily on site authority.
2. While they have enough content to rank for said terms, they don’t have pages targeting those terms. In many cases the relevant content for the phrase is compressed as part of a broader related page.
3. Their title tags target core keywords and lacks modifiers needed to rank well for popular terms that Wikipedia did not dedicate unique pages to.

By fixing the above issues, they may very well rank for the remaining 11 keywords.

My response: Yes, Wikipedia is all about site authority. No long tail. Just a good and trust source of information. Regarding Bullet Point No. 2 - that’s an important SEO principle. You don’t necessarily have to build pages that target specific keywords to rank for those keywords. If you get enough inbound links using a particular phrase as anchor text then you can rank for that key phrase. Match it up with a web page that is relevant in a broad sense and you can steal the thunder of top notch websites in your industry. Finally, if Wikipedia did fix those three issues above then they might actually rank for more than the remaining 11 keywords. But will they?

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Category: Search Engine Positioning

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