Bill Slawski : Rewriting the Wikipedia on Search Engine Optimization
If you’re going to try and clean up the face and perception of SEO, might as well get started with rewriting the definition. I was tickled today when stopping by my good friend and former workmate Bill Slawski’s SEO by the SEA blog and reading Bill’s latest post Improving the Wikipedia results for Search Engine Optimization.
Bill, who is infamous in SEO, usability, and Newark Delaware’s coffee shop & newsstand circles as being an unselfish contributor of his wealth of opinions and information; is not too happy with the Wikipedia’s pages on Search Engine Optimization and feels that it is his obligation to add the knowledge of his years & experience from Cre8asite, SEO by the SEA and more recently Search Engine Watch to his new mission.
From Bill’s post:
Statements like this one really need to be changed:
Search engine operators became interested in the SEO community soon after the first search engine was launched. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking #1 was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top ranked page, placing it on your site, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.
As far as I know, there wasn’t an SEO community that sprung up out of nowhere at the time that the first search engines were launched.
I’d like to see the Wikipedia article improve, and I ask that if you have some ideas and a few spare moments in the next couple of weeks, to visit the page and see if you can help make it better. I’ll be making more changes as I find time. Instead of trying to add links to external resources, a sentence or two in the article itself that helps improve its quality would be a great addition.
I highly recommend stopping by SEO by the SEA, reading Bill’s post in its entirety (refill your coffee cup before hand), and maybe even lending a hand to Bill’s new project.
Thank God for all of those coffee shops and the news stands. Great places to get some thinking done, and share some ideas. :)
I’ve made a little more than a dozen changes to the Wikipedia entry so far, and fortunately none of them have been rolled back yet. Some of the related pages also need some additions and changes, too.
Seems like a good thing to do for a couple of minutes everyday. Be great to have some assistance if anyone is interested. I’ve seen a lot of complaints about that page, and grumbled over it myself. Feels good to take some action.
Thanks, Loren.
Ironically, SEO did in fact spring up right after that first one was lauched.
The term * Search Engine Optimizating * was initially used to refer to the TECHNICAL Query efficiency of Search Engines.
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One Marketer started the term Web promotion in 1994 -
http://www.ericward.com/yahoo.txt
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while one of us used Search Engines Optimization afterwards for both the promotion and the technical…on Websites and in NewsGroups.
Why it caught on like this is hard to imagine…
Speaking as a Wikipedia editor of a couple of years’ experience, and now a UK press contact for Wikimedia, I can say that good information on any important subject is most welcomed. The way to get your changes to stay are:
(1) References. Good, authoritative, verifiable third-party references. The reader can judge statements on the quality of the sources.
(2) Neutrality. This is not quite the same as “balance” or “equal time”, but a sort of third-party position, standing to the side of it all, writing something that will be useful to the reader now, in a year, in ten years. This is harder than it sounds to get absolutely right, but this is a wiki after all!
There’s a lot of silly myths about SEO, as there are about lots of things related to marketing. Anything that adds quality information to Wikipedia is good.
Thanks for the pointers, David.
I’m striving to follow both as well as I can. The wikipedia does have some excellent guidelines and help sections, and I’ve been trying to keep within them.
One issue that’s plagued the SEO page is that some of the best and most authoritative sources that could be cited are ones that have been removed from the article for fear that they are attempts by the author or authors of those sites to spam the wikipedia.
That’s fine though. Instead of citing a source like Search Engine Watch, I’m perfectly willing to cite a respected academic paper that cites Search Engine Watch. There are more than a handful of them out there. (See the discussion page for the article, for more about some of the controversy over external links from the article.)
Example: See reference number 3 in Automatic Identification of User Interest For Personalized Search (pdf), which cites a Search Engine Watch Report from 2003. The failure to include a site like Search Engine Watch in an article that is supposed to be about SEO is forgiveable in light of the fact that the contributors to the page appear to not know enough about SEO to know which sources are authoritative.
That can be fixed.