Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Wikipedia Gets Ranked On Or Near The Top

Posted by Anonymous on 5/8/2007 at 12:51 PM ET 500 Points
No matter what we search on Google, Wikipedia is ranked at or very near the top of the list. I search; cars, Simon, white paper and slavery. Wikipedia always appears on the top of the list. I'm trying to determine how that works. Do people really search for cars and white papers, primarily, on Wikipedia? Or is Wikipedia popular IN GENERAL and that's what is producing the high rankings for specific searches? Many thanks.
Jeff
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by excellira on 5/8/2007 at 1:14 PM Accepted
    There are a number of reasons for this.

    The number of backlinks is huge:
    Google: 65.800
    Yahoo! 56,677,275

    The sheer number of indexed pages on the site has value:
    Live: 3,677,414
    Y: 46,348,275
    G: 11,000,000

    The site is mature which is a factor for some SEs.

    SEs are text readers and the site is predominently text.
    Given the size of the site the content is relevent to many searches.

    Site structure is good. Good urls. Good Code (from SEO standpoint).

    The social aspects are what truly make this site successful. Individuals can post and edit the content. This is good for a lot of psychological reasons.

    It can also be a good resource which brings a lot of people to the site. It has useful content (most of the time anyway).

    It creates debate amongst visitors and contributors within categories. Controversy is always good for driving traffic.

    I guess if you were to create a web site to generate rankings you could truly use them as an example.

    I hope this helps.

    -Greg Hill
  • Posted by Shell Harris on 5/8/2007 at 1:21 PM Accepted
    Its all about the links. Wikipeida has 37,373,428 links pointing to its various pages according to Yahoo!. That is a lot of link popularity. To put this in perspective, Yahoo! has 65,419,742 backlinks, CNN has 9,788,943 and Marketingprofs.com has 158,190.

    Large link numbers usually means your site is considered an authority and Google likes authority sites and tends to rank them very highly, as you can see.

    Of course having a page with focused content is also important and Wikipedia pages are very focused. When you combine that with massive amounts of links, good things happen in the search engines.
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