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What I'd like to see somebody from Google explain to me is why Google considers Wikipedia as an example of a high-quality site (Cutts says so in http://www.wire

by zone411 16y ago

What I'd like to see somebody from Google explain to me is why Google considers Wikipedia as an example of a high-quality site (Cutts says so in http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/all/1 http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-...), when Wikipedia users copied and regurgitated content from a website I own at least 4000 times (that's how many times it's been referenced on different Wikipedia pages, it has likely been copied thousands of more times without being referenced). Wikipedia ranks #1 or #2 for almost all these articles when my site is rarely among the top ten and it has also been hurt in this latest update. How does this work?

edsrzf 16y ago
It's not that Wikipedia is necessarily high quality, it's that users want to see relevant Wikipedia articles near the tops of their searches. It's a really useful starting point for a wide variety of searches.
- zone411 16y ago
  You might say the say thing about many other content farms. That's their whole purpose: to appear good enough for people who are not very familiar with the topic. Google specifically said that the goal of their update was to penalize "low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-qua...). As I said, Wikipedia did exactly this. Thousands of times for just this one site. Providing links on the bottom to where they copied their content from is not a high-value add. This update punished my high quality site and helped Wikipedia.
robk 16y ago
The noncommercial nature of wikipedia at least makes it somewhat more trustworthy than other sites with likely commercial motives.
- zone411 16y ago
  This has been disproven many times. People with commercial and political and other motives can write Wikipedia's content, which can be much more damaging than clearly marked ads. Also, since Wikipedia copied, regurgitated, and sometimes introduced errors in content from a commercial site (which you don't consider trustworthy), it is obviously not any more trustworthy.
danneu 16y ago
Wikipedia has very decentralized interests unlike single-owner websites. Google can entrust it because things like link solicitation are hard to keep in Wikipedia articles because of its open-source nature.
aaronwall 16y ago
The big issue here is that if you don't get other people to link to your stuff then Google has little way to distinguish quality vs non-quality, source vs copy, lower quality rewrite, etc. While many people find push marketing tasteless and annoying (and perhaps a signal of poor product quality), the truth is that most successful sites have relied on the person launching them already having some combination of status + influence + distribution + connections, or they used push marketing for a while to build that following and awareness. The easiest SEO answer to obscurity or lack of awareness (assuming the on-page SEO & site structure are solid) is to think territorially & dominate a niche where you can own the idea. This is a great article on that front. http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-dominate-your-niche/ http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-dominate-your-niche/
- zone411 16y ago
  Right, I understand technical reasons why Wikipedia outranks this site. Google started by being terribly arrogant in thinking that they are smarter than SEOs and their search engine would be so hard to game, that they made the Page Rank values publicly visible. It went downhill for them quickly, necessitating introduction of no-follow, which is why my site gets no benefit at all from any of these Wikipedia links. Wikipedia also benefits from all other content on their site (some of which is admittedly good enough, especially in topics of interest to programmers).
  - aaronwall 16y ago
    Here is another great article for understanding the Google / Wikipedia ecosystem http://www.johnon.com/399/google-las-vegas.html http://www.johnon.com/399/google-las-vegas.html

by zone411 16y ago

edsrzf 16y ago

It's not that Wikipedia is necessarily high quality, it's that users want to see relevant Wikipedia articles near the tops of their searches. It's a really useful starting point for a wide variety of searches.

zone411 16y ago
You might say the say thing about many other content farms. That's their whole purpose: to appear good enough for people who are not very familiar with the topic. Google specifically said that the goal of their update was to penalize "low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-qua...). As I said, Wikipedia did exactly this. Thousands of times for just this one site. Providing links on the bottom to where they copied their content from is not a high-value add. This update punished my high quality site and helped Wikipedia.

robk 16y ago

The noncommercial nature of wikipedia at least makes it somewhat more trustworthy than other sites with likely commercial motives.

zone411 16y ago
This has been disproven many times. People with commercial and political and other motives can write Wikipedia's content, which can be much more damaging than clearly marked ads. Also, since Wikipedia copied, regurgitated, and sometimes introduced errors in content from a commercial site (which you don't consider trustworthy), it is obviously not any more trustworthy.

danneu 16y ago

Wikipedia has very decentralized interests unlike single-owner websites. Google can entrust it because things like link solicitation are hard to keep in Wikipedia articles because of its open-source nature.

aaronwall 16y ago

The big issue here is that if you don't get other people to link to your stuff then Google has little way to distinguish quality vs non-quality, source vs copy, lower quality rewrite, etc. While many people find push marketing tasteless and annoying (and perhaps a signal of poor product quality), the truth is that most successful sites have relied on the person launching them already having some combination of status + influence + distribution + connections, or they used push marketing for a while to build that following and awareness. The easiest SEO answer to obscurity or lack of awareness (assuming the on-page SEO & site structure are solid) is to think territorially & dominate a niche where you can own the idea. This is a great article on that front. http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-dominate-your-niche/ http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-dominate-your-niche/

zone411 16y ago
Right, I understand technical reasons why Wikipedia outranks this site. Google started by being terribly arrogant in thinking that they are smarter than SEOs and their search engine would be so hard to game, that they made the Page Rank values publicly visible. It went downhill for them quickly, necessitating introduction of no-follow, which is why my site gets no benefit at all from any of these Wikipedia links. Wikipedia also benefits from all other content on their site (some of which is admittedly good enough, especially in topics of interest to programmers).
- aaronwall 16y ago
  Here is another great article for understanding the Google / Wikipedia ecosystem http://www.johnon.com/399/google-las-vegas.html http://www.johnon.com/399/google-las-vegas.html