Caydel’s SEO Blog

I just read an interesting post by Andy Hagens called ‘Four Trusted Links You Can Build Today‘. I have a few comments on the article I thought I would share (lucky you!)

In his post, Andy writes,

“A lesser-known Wikipedia page: Do you have an investment-related site? Do not try to add your homepage link to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock. Instead, add the deep link to your “The Forward P/E Ratio Explained” page from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PE_ratio… it’ll have a much better chance of still being there tomorrow.”

Now, I have some good and some bad things to say about this.

The Bad: First of all, any one who spams their link to Wikipedia merely for the sake of the link should be stoned. And I don’t mean in the nice, familiar Western way. I mean with rocks. Really, really large rocks.

The Good: That said, this can be a really effective link building method, if your sites contain quality content. Again, if you are merely spamming links, see above.

When I originally started looking at this method some time ago, I came across some interesting realizations - many of the ‘deeper’ subjects are not covered. Just this evening for instance, I was trying to find ways to build Wikipedia links to a site of mine, when I realized that a number of subjects and topics I covered in the site DID NOT HAVE EXISTING WIKIPEDIA PAGES.

So, I did whatever any web designer would do in that situation - I created the pages. I wrote some good, high quality content for the Wikipedia articles. Obviously, they were subjects I was already interested in, since I had created web pages and complete sites around some of these subjects.

So, in essence, I have a bunch of Wikipedia articles which now contain my page among very few others.

Regardless of how you get your links into Wikipedia, there are a few methods to ‘pimp’ out your Wikipedia links so that they pass on the most linkjuice possible.

1. Interlink the pages - In short, search Wikipedia for all instances and mentions of the subject on which the article containing the links to your page, and link them to the page in question. This, to some extent, raises the profile of the article on the Wikipedia domain. It is a well known fact that Google includes internal links as well as external links when determining how important pages are to a site.
2. Maintain the pages - As with any web page, the more regular the updates, the more often the pages get spidered. Staleness of a page may be a major factor in Google’s algorithm, although there is some debate on the fact. At any rate, by making constant contributions to the article, and constantly improving the quality of the page, you will gain a site rep, and your changes are less likely to be immediately reverted.

Another site I noticed that is an easy mark for a good, albeit nofollowed link is AboutUs.org. This new site is gaining popularity recently, and I have begun noticing it linked to from the Domaintools.com tools. It is actually really interesting - it immediately will grab a site thumbnail, an excerpt, and isolates contact information, maps it with Google Maps, performs a bunch of other interesting feats, all in a great MediaWiki format. For a good example, check out the AboutUs.org page for Oilman’s blog.

Let me know what you think!

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I’ve just noticed this, although it may be old news by now. In the last few days, Wikipedia has begun adding rel=”nofollow” to their external links.

Now, I have a whole bunch of educational, informative sites, and between them, I have about 10-12 links in Wikipedia, in different languages. Please note that these links are legitimate, added by other people, since my pages are valuable resources for a variety of Wikipedia articles. So the fact that nofollow tags have been added to the external links kinda pisses me off - I have no doubt that they influenced the indexing and SERPS for the affected sites of mine.
What caused this change? As far as I know, there was no sudden insurgence of link spam on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community has in the past made it clear that they do not want nofollow links on Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia developers have publicly stated in the past that the setting to enable the nofollow tag was add to the mediawiki software for the use of smaller wikis, which do not have such large, active communities to fight linkspam. So why was it done? Who made the decision?
The recent increase in the use of the nofollow tag has me somewhat concerned. So many major sites are implementing it to avoid link spam, but where does that leave us? Link popularity is a major factor in most search engine algorithms etc…

Now, I realize that there still is a large debate ongoing on exactly what the effects of rel=”nofollow” are. There are some who content that the only effect is to stop Google PR from passing. On the other hand, if the nofollow tag happens to stop TrustRank, or authority from being forwarded to linked sites, well, this kind of threatens the stability of of any and all search algorithms that depend on such factors.

Anyone with any information, lease comment - I want to know more about the background of this, but I can’t find anything on Wikipedia, or Technorati that explains any of the reasoning for this!

EDIT: Many of my pages have been translated into languages other than english, and as such have recieved links from Wikipedias other than en.wikipedia.org. The English Wikipedia DOES NOT have the nofollow tags.

Wikis with nofollows: es, eo, de, fr, it, ja, nl, no, pl, pt, ru, fi, fl, sv… I suspect all except for en… So maybe this isn’t news… Either way, I still hate nofollows…

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