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Yeah, looking at it from a purely SEO perspective always makes decisions look kinda shady, as in they're trying to game some algorithm in order to gain more exp
by somedude895 6y ago
Yeah, looking at it from a purely SEO perspective always makes decisions look kinda shady, as in they're trying to game some algorithm in order to gain more exposure. Wikipedia's biggest SEO factor has to be the massive amount of backlinks it gets. Those are purely organic and happen simply because it is generally the best authority on most any topic. It's more of a testament to how genuinely good Google's algorithm has become rather than some masterplan by Wikipedia.
- aerosmile 6y agoOnce you have 150 million inbound links, the strategy choices are easy - focus on content quality! But you have to remember what Day 1 was looking like: a tiny community, no inbound links, and a fair amount of other encyclopedia competitors trying to attract authors. Now the strategy choices are quite interesting - at the beginning of a startup you have just enough energy/runway to "kill it" in one area. Which one do you focus on? Generating the world's best content alone without the heavy lifting they've done on deep interlinking and other SEO-friendly moves wouldn't have cut it.
- selestify 6y agoWhat were the competitors in the early days?
- aerosmile 6y agoFurther down in the comments you'll find a research paper [1] that analyzed why Wikipedia succeeded where others failed. I am not sure I bought into the conclusion (which prompted my initial comment), but at least it has a comprehensive listing of all the main players at the time: Interpedia, TDEP, Everything2, h2g2, TheInfo, Nupedia, GNE [1] https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf
- ghaff 6y agoThank you for posting that. It made me realize that I have the wrong citation in a footnote of a book I'm about to proof :-)