Wikipedia links - any value?
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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!
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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?
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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
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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.
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