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February 1, 2006

How to get free PR and lots of traffic from Wikipedia

by Andrew

Ever notice that obsession with directory listings website development forum users have? (sitepoint, digitalpoint) What is amusing is that, until recently, I’ve heard little to no mention of Wikipedia. Imagine that, a website people actually read, use, and follow links from (An Alexa rank of 31! Oh, and you can enter your link and have it instantly added to the page — no login needed.

wikipedia

Unlike most directories, Wikipedia sends real traffic. There are two reasons for this. First, many of Wikipedia’s entries have been getting high rankings in the search engines. Second, anyone can copy Wikipedia’s content (given that they follow the proper rules.) This means that your link will show up on hundreds of other pages around the internet. It hasn’t made me rich, but I’ve had scraper sites send me valuable traffic thanks to a Wikipedia link or two.

Things aren’t quite as easy as they sound. The novice Wikipedia user may not be aware that all changes are logged — IP included. Wikipedia’s active users and editors are very viligant. In fact, Wikipedia editors recently caught Congressional staffers making over 1,000 edits — including one calling another US Senator a “douche-bag.”

This attention to detail is probably why Wikipedia is nearly as accurate as The Encyclopedia Britannica. Expect your link to go under the microscope.

I’ll admit, even I got in trouble with Wikipedia a while ago. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been and I ended up getting a warning. A suggestion: if you add a link and it gets deleted, don’t re-add it again.

Wikipedia’s open nature at first appears to leave it open to exploitation. While spammy links may go unoticed in the lesser-used of Wikipedia’s 945,000 english entries don’t expect spam to last in popular entries. If you want your link to stick around it better be pretty damn relevent.

9 Comments

  1. While the traffic is nice… aren’t all Wikipedia external links using rel=nofollow now? I thought I heard about them making that policy so as to cut down on spam.

    Comment by Chris Beasley — February 3, 2006 @ 8:40 am

  2. I just looked at the HTML source and don’t see it. And I found this post from SERoundtable: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002877.html

    Comment by Andrew — February 3, 2006 @ 2:11 pm

  3. I added my site to the external links section of several pages, but they appear to have been immediately removed. In less than 10 minutes. Is it going through an approval process or did I do something wrong? My links were on the exact topic of the page.

    Comment by Jon Morrow — February 3, 2006 @ 7:23 pm

  4. When you added them did you ever see them on the page? There are specific subjects that are probably more prone to “spamming” and thus more carefully monitored. If you add a link to an entry that gets 10 updates a day, your site better be really damn good. If it gets 10 updates a year, its probably going to stay around for a while.

    Comment by Andrew — February 3, 2006 @ 9:56 pm

  5. I thought I saw them on the page, but I’m not entirely certain. I was moving pretty fast. Also, I doubt the topics of “landlord” and “investing in real estate” are being updated 10 times per day. Do you think I’m safe to add them again?

    Comment by Jon Morrow — February 3, 2006 @ 10:15 pm

  6. No, your link definately got cleared by an admin:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Landlord&diff=38073127&oldid=38072846

    Comment by Andrew — February 3, 2006 @ 11:36 pm

  7. I received this message from them:

    Please do not add commercial links — or links to your own private websites — to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or a mere collection of external links. Note that Wikipedia may see print or DVD publication, so we want more content, not more web links. See the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks. —Cleared as filed. 02:06, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

    so, how did you get away with it?

    Comment by Jon Morrow — February 3, 2006 @ 11:47 pm

  8. I think your site looks too commercial. The best strategy here would be to make a purely informational site and filter the traffic from there to your other site.

    Comment by Andrew — February 4, 2006 @ 1:42 pm

  9. Hmm, that’s too bad. For the short time I was listed, I received eight unique visitors. That’s pretty good for about 30 minutes.

    By the way, my site is purely informational. I don’t sell anything, nor do I have any ads. I think I’ll throw a quick protest to the editor.

    Comment by Jon Morrow — February 4, 2006 @ 8:02 pm

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