Conference notes from the “Wikipedia & SEO” session at Search Engine Strategies New York ‘07.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan

Speakers
Stephen Spencer, Founder/President, Netconcepts LLC
Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates LLC
Neil Patel, co-founder, Advantage Consulting Services

[L-R] Stephen Spencer (Netconcepts), Jonathan Hochman (JE Hochman), Don Steele (Comedy Central), Neil Patel (Advantage)

Neil Patel, co-founder, Advantage Consulting Services

Wikipedia can build traffic.

Don’t use Wikipedia as a link resource. Don’t bring down the quality of Wikipedia - add meaningful content. Don’t just add links.

Look for other wikis - many of them don’t use nofollow

Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates LLC

Wikipedia has a lot more traffic than Digg and del.icio.us and many other big names. Remarkable for a site with no marketing budget run by volunteers.

There are people on Wikipedia who enjoy hunting spammers. The Wikipedia spam list is used by 2000+/- different wikis worldwide.

Very relevant traffic - conversion rates can be quite high.

Articles about people must explain why the person is notable.

The administrators have extra tools, but not extra powers. Everyone on Wikipedia is considered equal.

You may edit your own article and write your own article, but it’s best not to. You have no rights to the article. Same for competitors. Read the conflict of interest guidelines. You can always remove slander and minor inaccuracies. You may not remove negative statements that can be attributed.

Be polite - you’ll do better…

Example: Criticism of Walmart - a disaster for Walmart.

Even if you can’t outrank a competitor in organic SERPs, chances are the Wikipedia article can. Better to have the neutral article at the top than the competitor’s page.

Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

Comedycentral.com gets 8 million uniques a month - owned by Viacom/MTV Networks

They do paid search and links from sister websites in MTV network

They go in and edit things as they choose and encourage viewers to do the same. In fact, Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, routinely asks viewers to manipulate information in Wikipedia and even Google search results. Given that Colbert is widely recognized as having Giant Brass Balls and possibly being the Greatest Living American - who can argue?

They get a lot of traffic from Wikipedia and they want to encourage people to go there.

They have to make sure that all the links from Wikipedia to their sites go to good pages with the relevant content. Anyone who gets interviewed on shows like the Daily Show or the Colbert Report - the fact that they were on Comedy Central gets entered in their bio and the link to the interview gets added.

Wikipedia is one of the most consistent sources of traffic for Comedy Central. They save about $20,000 a month by having a Wikipedia strategy.

South Park is an example of users loving and being passionate about the show and contributing content to Wikipedia. Cultural references in the show -> edits about South Park in the relevant pages.

They now have to post things to the discussion pages and wait for someone else to move it into the main article since they do get value from the mentions/links.

Stephen Spencer, Founder/President, Netconcepts LLC

Like other social media - build a history and reputation. Have a user page that explains who you are and why you’re there. Have a personal talk page and contribute to it. Communicate with the main players on each page.

References are better places for links than “external links”. The bottom line is to add value to the article.

You’ll need a really solid history to add a page. If you don’t have the reputation, find someone who does have the reputation. Again, notability is key for new pages. Google News archive search is a great resource in this regard. Don’t get your PR firm involved - they usually mess things up. Press releases don’t help.

When you have a page on you or your company - watch it closely. If you’re marked for deletion do whatever you can since it’s hard to recover from a deletion. Use a service to watch for changes.

Q&A

Don’t worry about the Wikipedia page knocking you out of first place for you company name because the Wikipedia article will have a link to your site.

Adding categories to the Wikipedia article will raise the PageRank because it adds inbound links to the page. Internal links don’t have nofollow. However, don’t add to big categories until you’ve tested the waters with smaller categories.

You are allowed to copy content from Wikipedia to your site.

Don’t have an army of sales people editing your company’s page - it will look suspicious.

Translations aren’t controversial edits (if you want to show up in wikis for other languages) - but add it as discussion.

Wikipedia will not overtake Google in search. Period. The press wants a Google-killer, but it’s not going to happen. Wikipedia can’t do search for long-tail terms (at least not well).

If you want to see that links that are nofollow use the “search status” plugin for Firefox.

If you can get your article to “featured status” (so it shows up on the home page) that’s a huge prize ’cause there’s a big bump in traffic. Same with “did you know?” Write an article 1000 words plus a picture and you can get it listed on the Wiki home page.

Tags: SEO/SEM, SES-NY, Social Media, wikipedia
Categories: Link Building, SEO/SEM, Social Media