Wikipedia Treated Too Well in Google?
A WebmasterWorld thread named Wikipedia gets too many high rankings shows one members dissatisfaction with Google ranking Wikipedia too well in Google results. For those of you who do not know what Wikipedia is, it is basically the largest wealth of knowledge maintained by volunteers online today. Basically, contributing writers, it can be you and me, add/edit/delete content from the Wikipedia. Since its open to anyone, it is susceptible to spam, but since anyone can then edit it, it is often corrected and cleaned quickly.
One member has a great two liner, explaining Wikipedia and wikis;
The bad thing of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it. :(
The good thing of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it. :)
Now, Google knows this, and must deem Wikipedia an authority on any topic it covers. Hence it ranks well. Besides for the authoritative status; it has lots of fresh content (new pages and updated pages daily), the content is all unique, there are tons of links pointing to the site and its fast loading (to name a few of the hundreds of variables).
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Barry Schwartz is the Editor of Search Engine Roundtable and President of RustyBrick, Inc., a Web services firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales.
Is this a bad thing? As long as the results from wikipedia is relevant to my google searches.
There are many other websites cheating their way up the google ranks with irrelevant information to corresponding keywords searches that people should take more concern to.
The Wikipedia encyclopedia has just about everything Google could want. Authoritative sources pointing to it (do a news search for wikipedia and look at the quality of the inbound links), regular updates, particularly for fast-changing events, and a group of authors dedicated to producing high quality original and authoritative secondary source content. Links to good followup sources on many subjects and no ads to annoy those who go there. Simply, it does many of the things Google says you should do to be ranked well and does them honestly. Plenty of room for envy but harder to keep up with 1.6 changes per second (half a million per week in English alone) and steadily increasing quantity and quality.
Google is aware of the mirrors and has probably been tweaking – it asked for feedback on the subject some time ago and probably received sensible comments in response. Some mirrors do clearly offer added value; some clearly don’t.
Expect search engines to make increasing use of Wikipedia results in the future. Various things in the pipeline as they try to improve the service they deliver to their users.
Spam (and viral marketing, in breach of several policies) are challenges which can be dealt with but Wikipedia deliberately moves slowly in these areas and starts out just by throwing lots of humans at the problem. Technical (DNSBL checks for spam, nofollow tag use) and perhaps notices that only read access is authorised can follow later, if appropriate and only for significant annoyance sources. Significant meaning significant when you have a few thousand people dealing with the problem and it’s wasting enough time to be annoying a significant percentage of them. A few thousand links don’t qualify. The collective efforts of a few big viral marketing firms might just be enough to get them acted against, if they don’t show self-restraint to some degree.
Author is one of the Wikipedia technical team members but comments don’t represent any official positions, more typical practice.
The only thing of real concern should be if Google is artificially inflating its ranking. Does it have the amount of inbound links that other sites have / or more? Does it have, per page, the optimization other sites have? If so, it should be higher. If not, well thats cheating.
I’ve never heard Wikipedia be called fast loading before…