Is there any value in trying to add a page to wikipedia
-
Hi Mozzers,
My manager has asked me this question and I'm not quite sure how to answer it.
"Is there any value in trying to add a page about our company to wikipedia"
I would have thought it's very difficult to get a page to stick in wikipedia if it's about a company that isn't huge (like Apple or Google). Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
Personally I think it's potentially quite risky and unlikely to bring much traffic (because I can't imagine anyone would visit a page on wiki about my company - not that my company isn't great, because it is, it's just not HUGE or global...) I think a wiki page could be a bit spammy!
Would welcome your input, and I am happy to be proven wrong!
Thanks,
Amelia
-
Thank you Mark, I think you've made some excellent points here.
-
I will also note that we have a few Wikipedia links (we're a wine club and have an education section about obscure grapes) and while those are no-follow, we've gained a few do-follow links from people using the information directly from Wikipedia.
Personally, I'd guess that a company specific entry would be valuable, like any link on a site as popular as Wikipedia, even if the positive aspects are second hand.
-
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this discussion. I really appreciate everyone's input.
We'll put this in our 'ideas box' because it seems it needs a lot of thought to get right. I'll come back and let you know how we get on and what we decide to do (if we do anything at all that is).
-
If you get your page to stay, you may have a tricky time making it accurate. We've battled with the SEOmoz/Moz Wikipedia pages. Despite extensive notes in the Talk page from Rand, there are still a ton of inaccuracies in the page (last time I looked).
-
You can add a link to the website in external links, but as it's no followed it won't pass any link juice anyway.
The whole point of a wiki page is to give customers more information about a brand and will help to build your brand presence. I've previously had trouble with Wiki trying to get a listing as there was too much bias and not enough references.
-
Good Morning!
Wikipedia is a strange beast. It ranks incredibly well in Google because it is full of expertise, authority, and is very trustworthy. When writing for Wiki the most important question to ask is how are you going to make sure it stays there.
Wikipedia was built on the crowd sourcing premise. At first anybody could add content, and anybody could modify content. This is why many Universities were/are hesitant to accept Wikipedia as a reference in research. As time progressed, in an attempt to keep things more accurate, wikipedia started giving members more power, and gave them the voluntary job of monitoring sections. For example my brother earned a PhD in linguistics, he voluntarily acted as one of the moderators for anything that was posted in the linguistics section of Wikipedia. He would read everything, spell check, proof, and most important verify, verify, verify.
As a moderator he would look for 3 things:
- Validity- Is this information true?
- Benefit- Does this information progress the body of knowledge?
- Spam- Is this someone just trying to get a link?
The last one didn't happen as often. As much as he loved it, linguistics isn't exactly the hottest subject in the Wikipedia library, but none the less people would add content that on the surface appeared to be beneficial, but was actually superficial and just trying to get a link.
Every subject has a moderator. Everything is moderated now. That being said, the Wikipedia page for the "Olympics" is looked at much more closely than the Wikipedia page for "plastic infused rubber flux capacitor pencils"... A link from the Olympics Wikipedia page will be much more difficult to get, but potentially MUCH more valuable.
Wikipedia links are great, but they can be removed very easily if you are not careful. Find something special about your company to mention. Maybe some big mortgage/commercial trust laws that were passed that you participated in. Some sort of event that received coverage. Something about your founder/ceo. I personally think creating a link simply because your website is informative isn't enough to keep the link there. It might, who knows, but if you can find something else, something that had more of an impact, I would try and go with that. Go big, find something that really had an impact, and put that on wikipedia. If that doesn't work, you can always go smaller.
I also really like PixelByPixel's idea, veryyyyyyyyyy clever!
Hope that helps!
Edit In response to what Darren said (his post went up when I was typing) like PixelPixel said, all Wikipedia links are now NOFOLLOW. So there isn't really a link benefit from doing it. However, seeing as how every category is competing with Wikipedia for placement, might as well use it to your advantage.
Edit I just realized that 6 people posted while I was typing... geeze you are all fast!
-
For link juice I would say there is little worth if others are not linking to the wiki page directly. As a casing point I looked up a local company to me, LUSH are a cosmetics firm who are pretty global and have been in the news fairly regularly. Their website is DA 59 and PA from the home page 66. Looking up the wikipage it is only a PA 1, therefore will make little impact on their rankings as far as I understand things. Still, no to say it never will in the future as it is a authoritative document and wouldn't be considered as spammy.
-
Thank you.
I have tried (in my more spammier days) to get a large (second largest in the UK) double glazing company in wikipedia, and it got taken down. I think this largely because the company in question completely changed my factual copy with salesy bs that should not be on wiki. I think wiki did the right thing taking it off (though I argued against that at the time because it was my job to do so).
-
Hi,
It's definitely worthwhile having a brand page on Wikipedia. Links are no followed and it won't massively increase your traffic but it will help to build your brand and if someone searches for your brand it will more than likely also show on the 1st page.
The Google Knowledge graph also uses information from Wikipedia, so if you aspire to have the knowledge graph show in results for your brand, you will first need a wiki page.
It isn't straight forward getting your brand on Wikipedia though as submissions need to be unbiased and have authoritative citations and references to back them up or Wiki won't publish the page.
Kind Regards
-
From a traffic perspective, it is really worthwhile doing. We listed a couple of our official European sites on relevant wiki pages and it really brought in a lot of relevant, engaged traffic. SEO-aside, if you have a legitimate reason to maintain some sort of presence on Wikipedia, it's worth it for the reach and potential traffic.
Edit: Fixed terrible grammar.
-
Thank you, good points...
I'll have to have a think because we probably do have legitimate reasons for being referenced in wiki (our sites are very informative).
Thanks for the tip.
-
One sneaky thing you can do is find a niche write about it and link to it e.g.
You company sells office supplies,
write something amazing and useful on office supplies e.g. a history of office supplies.
you can sometimes get a resource link this way on an article that already exists etc.
obviously this is leaning towards the spammier tactics and the links are still no-follow but if you feel it to be beneficial can be handy trick... but shhh its a secret!
Hope that's helpful.
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
-
Reducing Amount of Text on Web Pages-Risk of Killing Ranking?
We are a commercial real estate brokerage firm in Manhattan. Our site (w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . com) is text heavy and somewhat uninviting. Ranking is fair. Conversions awful. Our niche is very competitive. We plan on reducing the amount of text and making the site more visual. Among the planned changes: -Reduce amount of text in home page and text heavy pages. More emphasis on product (listings)
Branding | | Kingalan1
-Much larger photos for listings
-Lighter cleaner design with more open white areas
-Use of more visible fonts
-Better forms New design will be like: http://www.dernieretage-paris.com/ Theme and graphics based on Manhattan. More visuals. Better photos. Less text. But are we shooting ourselves in the foot by reducing text? Is there a risk that Google will reduce our ranking? Can we compensate for reduced text that is visible to visitors by completing meta tags more fully? Any thoughts??? Thanks,
Alan0 -
Domain authority vs indexed pages
Hello, There are many articles and from our personal experience we can say that you can rank a page without backlinks with high DA but we cant figure out if DA of domain help to rank as the link juice ( so the link juice going from home page thru all pages to specific page) or it will rank a page even if its not linked in any way from homepage or any other pages and even if it not linked in any way from other pages and still ranks just because of high DA, does that DA value will spread even above all indexed pages if you have lets say 100,000 pages, i mean if domain has 100 indexed pages and DA of 50 and another domain has 100,000 and DA of 100, if both pages are the same on those domains and have no backlinks to it from my understanding page on domain with 100 indexed pages and DA of 50 suppose to rank higher ? Please share what you think
Branding | | maxdelop0 -
Getting Google Plus Page to Appear
I've recently been making changes and updates to my company's verified local Google + page--my question is when and/or how do I configure it to appear in the search results? When I type my business into Google (Exchange Capital Management), it's not even within the results displayed. The page isn't accessible unless someone were to Google "Exchange Capital Management Google Plus." As mentioned, the page has been verified, updated, and has about 8,000+ views. Any advice or feedback is appreciated! All best, Lauren McLaughlin
Branding | | LMcLaughlin0 -
I have a company with multiple locations through out the US and I am trying to figure out the best way to use Google+ and Facebook.
Should I create separate pages for each location or should I create one account and add all my locations to that account?
Branding | | steve2150 -
Changing My Home Page Focus Keyword
Hello, We recently launched a new home page design on our company website, but we still have the same focus keyword in the title, H1, and in parts of the page copy. However, this focus keyword no longer represents our entire brand. We want to change the focus keyword and have done some research on the keyword difficulty and local searches in Google, but are still uncertain on the potential effects. Let me explain our situation more in depth. Instabill provides business owners with merchant accounts and other services. Our current focus keyword is offshore merchant accounts. However, over the past three months, we have been helping businesses establish US merchant accounts (retail, mobile, and online--but retail and mobile to US only while online to merchants everywhere) and intend to continue to increase our US merchant base. We are also still able to provide offshore merchant accounts. Our fear is that when a US merchant comes to our website (http://www.instabill.com), they will see Offshore Merchant Accounts in big H1 letters and leave our site since they want a local US merchant account. However, we still want to make sure our international merchants know we can still work with them. Thus said, we would like to change our focus keyword to something more broad, but still descriptive of our brand: merchant services. To elaborate, we want our H1 heading to read Merchant Services for Retail and Online Businesses. Merchant services is more descriptive since we provide more than just merchant accounts. We also provide the payment gateway, free shopping cart modules, help registering businesses, help obtaining an SSL certificate, and a discounted PCI Certification Service through McAfee. We have more than one page on our website that ranks for the term online merchant accounts, but none that rank for merchant services. However, we are willing to put in the work to ensure we optimize our website properly and put in the effort to make the change successful. Merchant services is also a keyword we would like to optimize on our website, so making the change on the home page will only help the steps in the process. Statistics:
Branding | | Instabill
Offshore Merchant Accounts has a 35% difficulty level and we consistently rank for SERPs #1 and #2. This term, according to the Google Keyword Tool, only receives 70 monthly searches in the US, 50 in the UK, 10 in Canada, and 10 in Australia. These are the four countries of most importance to our website. Merchant Services has a 57% difficulty level and we do not rank for it in Google at all since we have never tried to optimize for this term in the past. Also according to the Google Keyword Tool, this term receives 14,800 monthly searches in the US, 1,600 in the UK, 590 in Canada, and 260 in Australia. Clearly, merchant services could potentially get us much more traffic than offshore merchant accounts if transitioned correctly. I suppose my bottom line question is this: Would it be a bad idea to change my primary focus keyword on my home page? What type of results should I expect to see if searching Google for my company name? Thank you for all of your help. Meghan
Senior Copywriter of Instabill0 -
Googe+ personal profile & business page conundrum
I have asked this question before and am still seeking help. My apologies for being repetitive and hopefully not too pesky but I am sincere in my search for guidance. I am looking for advice on how to manage my personal G+ profile along with my business G+ page. My challenge is the coordination between the two and getting people to add our biz page to their Circles instead of to me personally through my personal profile. Google+ requires that we have personal profiles- especially for authorship, but it's my business that I want to represent and promote. I do have the Google+ badge on my website and blog posts. And I am duplicating my posts on both the personal and business pages. I have joined a couple of communities and know that i need to find more and engage in those. And also, another question this brings up: in terms of the social signal aspect for our company website/blog, does it matter where I am building my Circles?
Branding | | gfiedel0 -
How to increase the value of naturally created low value links
My site is starting to generate natural links (hooray!). Basically, as part of my client sign-up process, I encourage my clients (home improvement contractors, plumbers, roofers, electricians) to link back to their own profile page on my site from their own site, either manually or using a badge I've created and made available. I have 2 questions about this. First of all, the vast majority of these links are from seriously low quality sites with basically no backlink profile whatsoever. Many of these sites aren't even indexed. So I'm starting to feel like I'm doing all this hard work for nothing. Is there anything I can do to increase the value of these incoming links, without spending too much time or money? I'm thinking directory submission and/or link wheel gigs on fiverr (really crappy SEO, I know, but just to get these sites bumped up a notch, and hopefully not do any damage to my site, as they're a step removed.) Second question, the profile pages that my clients can create on my site includes a nofollowed link to their site. Does the nofollow save me from having all of my incoming links tagged as reciprocal? Is there anything else I should be doing?
Branding | | menachemp0 -
Benefits of +1ing a Sub Page vs. Root Page
Say I'm on Nike and I +1 a soccer shoe page...does the Nike root page rank higher/for more terms for my google+ followers or would just the soccer shoe page?
Branding | | Hakkasan0