Reasons Why Wikipedia Ranks So High in the Search Engines
There has been some confusion in the internet marketing world for the past few years about Wikipedia and why it is ranked so high in Google. Really it’s fairly simple and some people don’t realize the power of how their site is set up.
I’ll see it all the time where one of its pages will have the first few spots of a highly trafficked search term and it will only have a few backlinks to that page. At the same time, a whole entire site dedicated to the term might be a few places down from it with thousands of backlinks. I have seen other webmasters become furious and totally confused. Sure Wikipedia is recognized as a credible source in Google’s eyes and most of their pages have a high PageRank, but there really is more to it than that. You have to look at why that particular page has the high PageRank to begin with.
One of the main reasons Wikipedia has so many pages ranked high in the SERPS is because it uses lots of internal linking. Just look at one page in Wikipedia and you will see anchor text links to at least 25 different internal pages. It sends massive link reputation from lots of different pages (which also have high PageRank) with the highly searched keyword in anchor text.
So you can get an understanding of how this works, I’ll show you a example. I just picked a random highly searched term, “engraving” and sure enough Wikipedia’s page about engraving showed up first in Google.
So then I used Yahoo’s Site Explorer to check how many offsite backlinks were sent to that page by typing in “link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engraving -site:wikipedia.org“. It turns out that it has about 814 sites linking to it and the website right below it had 13,500 links. See the photo below:
So I checked how many total links that where pointing to the Wikipedia Engraving page and it showed 4,260 links. All I did was remove “ -site:wikipedia.org“ and researched as seen in the picture below.
When you subtract the links from other sites, that leaves us with about 3,446 internal links pointing to this page with the keyword “engraving” from other pages that also have very high PageRank.
I hope that helps show you the power of internal linking and creating lots of great content for your site. Please leave some comments or questions below.
This is a guest post provided by Eric Woolf of Pixels and Dots Search Engine Optimization team.
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18 Responses to “Reasons Why Wikipedia Ranks So High in the Search Engines”
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Nice explanation. I think you can get a better look into their internal backlinks by using Open Site Explorer. You can filter backlinks by internal links only. =)
Nice post. This same question has come up with my clients before, and it’s a neat way to explain how SEO basically works. If any UK readers out there are after Search Engine Optimisation advice and would like a free review of their site, please feel free to check out www.SearchScientist.co.uk and contact me directly on louise@searchscientist.co.uk.
Cheers,
Louise
Search Scientist Ltd
Thanks for the great post. I think Wikipedia certainly does highlight the power of a strong internal linking strategy on your website. I have worked with a number of clients whose only internal linking was through their site navigation. If there are some internal pages with good pagerank increasing the internal linking within the site seems to help search rankings
Great post but for those not in the SEO field, always make sure use of internal linking is done naturally from relevant pages! Don’t start putting anchored text links on each of your internal pages pointing to each other! So, make it sound natural. One way is to start with one of your targeted pages then search for relevant terms within your pages, then make those terms pointing to your targeted page. You can use advanced operators like intext:text site:example.com and so on. Good luck!
sherlockseo
Why Wikipedia Ranks So High in the Search Engines http://dailyseotip.com/reasons-why-wikipedia-ranks-so-high-in-the-search-engines/966/
Very useful post…especially because we must remove the idea that putting external links is negative for seo ..
As an admitted novice whose primary focus is at the “local search” level the two almost universal shortcomings I see are horrific HTML/onsite issues (absolutely no doubt that web designers are the #1 reason SEO is needed) closely followed by poor internal site structure. Basic functional linking isn’t even correct let alone contextual linking.
My perspective is simple. All content is relevant or it doesn’t belong on your website. If you can’t see three natural points of interaction between any given page and the rest of the website then you need to evaluate either the content on the page, the relevance of the page to the overall website….or both.
@ Fabio Thanks, I actually never used Open Site Explorer and will look into this, but Yahoo Site Explorer does this also.
@Ualie75 Yes I agree, if a site is helpful to the reader and informational, then definitely link to it.
@ Fabio, okay I think your right. I didn’t see this option to pin point exactly how many internal there are.
Great piece of information. I always wondered why Google ranks Wikipedia pages about other sites almost everytime.
Firstly I thought it will be well becoz its a great information portal and Google and other SEs trust it a lot. But your research shows its more than trust, it about optimization.. Internal Links are very important to pass on the PR juice as well as it helps in rankings too…
Rajeesh, I do think its because it is considered a trustworthy site. I think its because of both internal optimization and trust- they both actually work together to help each other also.
No wonder when I search for the term “love” on google, wikipedia is the first link it shows. Great article, it cleared up why wikipedia always lands first on google’s result list.
Thanks for the post. This is yet more proof of the power of internal linking. Time to get busy!
Aha! Your post was just what I needed today, it explains so well the SEO linking startegy I’ve been working with.
this is absolutely true. We optimized our page with internal links and anchor text and jumped to top search ranks. Basically structure your site like wikipedia with as many internal links as possible coming from within text. that’s the whole trick
nice… this information really use on me.. thanks
internal links and anchor text and jumped to top search ranks.
Wikipedia is a site which is known all over the world. Whenever you search for something it pops up among the top first sites and this means that most of their pages rank very highly. It was nice of you to explain why this is so.