Wikipedia links - any value?
-
Hello everyone. We recently posted some of our research to Wikipedia as references in the "External Links" section. Our research is rigorous and has been referenced by a number of universities and libraries (an example: https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/company-suffixes.php). Anyway, I'm wondering if these Wikipedia links have any value beyond of course adding to the Wiki page's information. Thanks!
-
In the olden days, before search engines, our elders judged links based upon the traffic they would send. You have to consider that someone is going to click on that link. Maybe that set's the site up as an authority in one person's mind. Eventually they will run into other people that are like-minded .
Maybe these people go out and publish something, with followed links, from somewhere pretty nice. It may be a long shot, but Wikipedia tends to rank well for informational queries. The links that may follow would help later.
You have content on a site with pretty high visibility. I would ask you, how is this a bad thing?
-
Adam - remember that PageRank was only updated every few months (these days, even less) - can you be sure if those earlier links were already taken into account before the Wikipedia link was added? Also, maybe followed links came from websites that scrape or otherwise use Wikipedia's content?
I agree that Wikipedia links can be valuable though. It's an edited resource, and it's likely your content will be linked from a page that's relevant to your content, which helps. I've seen decent levels of engaged traffic from Wikipedia links.
If all you do on Wikipedia is add your own links though - you could end up getting banned from it. Rather than just adding links you should be adding value to the page content as a whole - pieces of your research could be really helpful to readers of the Wikipedia page and lead to more traffic to your website. It will also look less suspicious if you add other trusted links and make good contributions to edits on a number of pages. Wikipedia doesn't like biased content either.
-
Just to confirm what my findings discovered, it showed that Wikipedia does (or at least did then) actually provide value from an SEO sense. The external links are indeed nofollow however Google could be wavering the nofollow status of those links because of the fact it is "Wikipedia".
-
Like what Wiqas and Adam said. Wiki links are nofollow so in SEO sense, it may not provide you any value.
However, it definitely brings in a lot of value in driving traffic to your site. In the end, you are doing SEO because you want more people to notice your site and increase traffic which is what Wiki is doing.
In conclusion, i would say it Wiki links bring value to your site.
-
Wiki Pages links are Nofollow'ed So They do not pass link juice to the external pages.
But Wiki links are still valuable as it adds authority/diversity as well as traffic too.
Thanks
-
From the research I have done I would say they are worth it. The external links in Wikipedia are nofollow however I have seen reason to believe that Google still counts links from Wikipedia. This test is a few years old now so it may have changed but this is what I found.
I built a new site on a new domain for a client that was a local restaurant. Once the site was live it gathered a couple of links all very small in terms of pagerank value. The site sat at PR0 for over a year.
Some time after that the site was listed on the villages Wikipedia page as an external link (of course no followed). The wikipedia page itself was a PR3. After the next PR toolbar update my clients site received a PR2 update.
From that I knew fully well that there was no other links pointing to the site that would have affected this. Since that day I have always assumed that Google pushed value to sites linked from Wikipedia followed or no followed. But as I say, this test is about 4-5 years years old now.
Hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal links to preferential pages
Hi all, I have question about internal linking and canonical tags. I'm working on an ecommerce website which has migrated platform (shopify to magento) and the website design has been updated to a whole new look. Due to the switch to magento, the developers have managed to change the internal linking structure to product pages. The old set up was that category pages (on urls domain.com/collections/brand-name) for each brand would link to products via the following url format: domain.com/products/product-name . This product url was the preferential version that duplicate product pages generated by shopify would have their canonical tags pointing to. This set up was working fine. Now what's happened is that the category pages have been changed to link to products via dynamically generated urls based on the user journey. So products are now linked to via the following urls: domain.com/collection/brand-name/product-name . These new product pages have canonical tags pointing back to the original preferential urls (domain.com/products/product-name). But this means that the preferential URLs for products are now NOT linked to anywhere on the website apart from within canonical tags and within the website's sitemap. I'm correct in thinking that this definitely isn't a good thing, right? I've actually noticed Google starting to index the non-preferential versions of the product pages in addition to the preferential versions, so it looks like Google perhaps is ignoring the canonical tags as there are so many internal links pointing to non-preferential pages, and no on-site links to the actual preferential pages? I've recommended to the developers that they change this back to how it was, where the preferential product pages (domain.com/products/product-name) were linked to from collection pages. I just would like clarification from the Moz community that this is the right call to make? Since the migration to the new website & platform we've seen a decrease in search traffic, despite all redirects being set up. So I feel that technical issues like this can't be doing the website any favours at all. If anyone could help out and let me know if what I suggested is correct then that would be excellent. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Guy_OTS0 -
How to build links to landing pages?
I have been using link baits like infographics to get quality links to my site and I have observed that these tactics are great to get links to the home page or that particular post page where infographic was originally posted. But we have various other important landing pages and we want to transfer some link equity to those pages. Whenever we publish an infographic we post it on out blog with an embed code carrying anchor text pointed to our site’s home page. People who share our infographic, normally links to the home page or to the post page where they find that particular item. So, what are the possible ways to get links to any other landing page? Can we post some bait on other landing pages as well. I need to know some more techniques to attract deep links. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaz_lhr1 -
Do links from twitter count in SEOMoz's Toolbar link count?
I am using the Chrome extension and looking at a SERP, when a page is said to have 2000 incoming links, does that include tweets with a link back to this page? What about retweets. Are those counted separately or as one? And what about independent tweets that have exactly the same content (tweet text + link)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davhad0 -
Are links from pages in other languages ok?
Hey everyone, what are your thoughts on this? If a bunch of links from another language, say the site is in Canada and is in English but we have french links pointing to the site with english keywords...is that ok? Will that harm us? Opinions? Facts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
How quickly should you aquire links?
Hi Guys, How often should you aquire links without getting into trouble with Goolge? Should you aqure a linka day? Or a link every 2 days? What should it be? Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Big Site Wide Link
Hi Guys, I've noticed that Google is starting to de-value site-wide links... Our previous SEO agency sourced us a site wide link on a big website and at the moment within Google Webmaster Tools its showing 749,726 links from this 1 source. Do you think this is too many? Could this be being flagged by Google? Here is the site: http://tinyurl.com/7bttw3b Cheers, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Should I remove all rel=nofollow links?
I have a 60 page site that had some nofollow links sprinkled throughout, 50% of which are probably on its mailto: email links. Should I remove all nofollows all in one go, or just the mailto links first, and later the others? Or has anyone had any negative effects in 2012 from this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
Are Facebook links really helpful?
If they are no follow, how can I benefit? If Google isn't using this data, than why would we bother to LIKE anyone or anybody?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0