Rand Fishkin demonstrates how to exploit Googles love for Wikipedia and knock someone you don’t like down a bit.
I dig this new, GQ, not afraid to show he dabbles in the dark arts, Rand Fishkin 
Spotted from Graywolf and techcrunch
Graywolf gives some good commentary on the video here:
BTW I would also like to add thank you for everyone respecting my wishes and not making me a wikipedia page.
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Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 41 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a clever idea – as annoying as it would be having wikipedia hogging the top search result on every page, I doubt Google would be that bothered about changing the algorithms, would it?
Love the title, I just said that very line yesterday talking about the new “wiki juice stand” that opened locally…LMAO
Also I don’t see the point doing this – he even said towards the end of the video that wikipedia will be very hard to beat in the search engine rankings. Therefore theres no point helping wikipedia out, you might as well focus on improving your on sites rankings, IMO
ya.. your confused. the point is wikipedia will push down your enemies results because of its authority.
Question is with manipulation of the wiki starting seep into main stream press, how long is before “joe user” starts to get annoyed they are getting potentially whacked out info.
Why do it, to mess with someone. How long do you think it would take Jason Calacanis to start a tirade if his wiki page outranked his own domain for his name. Basically his destiny would be in the hands of any random passerby who decided to “fix” the wiki instead of his own control. Think about that for a moment.
Absolutely the wiki is accessible for the common man, but once it has a negative halo, and google keeps serving it google is in jeopardy. For example if you asked for a newspaper and instead of the New York Times the man behind the stand gave you the national enquirer how long would it take you to change newspaper stands …
I found the end the most interesting. Recently I’ve only been focused on external links and haven’t paid any attention to internal.
isn’t this like giving a weapon to everyone, and then telling them never to use it?
This was a great video, I saw it on the seomoz blog, then on tech crunch today,
Thats 100% true, I hate when wiki out ranks me,
The next one he should so is digitalpoint, they out rank many “webmaster” keywords and phrases
~Brew
As he says, its not of much use since the you will have to compete with wikipedia yourself to regain the top spot. Unless you are just trying to knock someone down but have no interest in that niche. But Im not sure why anyone would do that
Dang Wikipedia is overpowered… what are Google doing!?
What a clever idea. I’m putting it into place right now
well, not a great idea! I’ll tell you why:
If you’ll start to promote business stuff on wiki pages you’ll get kicked out on no time including your pages. I have tried this stuff before but they take out all external links very fast.
LOL!
Thanks for the video. I gotta try this in niches I failed at ^_^
Not like I’m bitter or anything
Interesting, but a little confusing… do you link to the wikipedia page for sun or the google search results page for sun?
I enjoy wikipedia but it’s way over-ranked in the Serps
’cause shoey out is wikity wikity wikity wack! That brought back some memories. It is hard to decide whether or not to go with Wiki or not because of what was said about the page rank spot, yet it does link to your site in the long run, and also yes it “may” take away from your site’s immediate page re-call memory productivity at the top spot. I guess if your site has got a tough keyword like mine, it is a good idea. WIGOB!
“BTW I would also like to add thank you for everyone respecting my wishes and not making me a wikipedia page.”
lol now they will man!
Yea but I mean surely it will be pushing down your site too (if you have a site listed in google under that keyword) – so I don’t really see the use of it?
If anyone wants to make me a Wikipedia page feel free.
Paul – Your are correct about it being overranked in the serps.
And on top, Wikipedia plans to counter Google with a new searchengin and it does not want adsense on its pages… I wonder what extra value Wikipedia brings to Google really.
Although I have to add that my daily traffic from Wikipedia is not bad at all.
So in a way, we often get traffic we would never get just because a particular Wikipage with our mag as reference is scoring high and getting quite some traffic.
You just can’t have it all I think?
yes thats what your not getting. It has nothing to do with your site. You dont have to even have a site.
Neat little trick. I guess I would have to agree with rand that it is a Dick thing to do:).
Good tactic, but I think it highlights the weakness of Google’s algorithm more than anything else.It give Wiki far much trust IMO often ranking frankly bad articles over more relevant content. Shame about nofollow tags on the external links also,used to be a nice way to get some link love.
BTW how the hell do you not have a wiki page Shoe!? Surely someone would have put one up by now.
This was the closest I could find – any relation!?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Schoemaker
You give the wiki article for sun plenty on internal links form other related wiki articles like ‘stars’, ‘solar system’, ‘moon’, etc.
Chances are if you are doing this for your competitors, you are hurting yourself as well. This is an idiotic tactic, because your website is likely to carry the same products, or promote the same services as your competitor. Now that wikipedia outranks you both. DOH! like Homer Simpson reacts to this.
O..this is great stuff, there are some companies i want off the site simply becuase when i try to add my travel sites..they claim i am adversting. Hmmm..I sure the others are not
The problem with this tip for me is that I consider Wikipedia itself to be my “enemy” in most cases.
I would outsource this for someone else to do while I focus on other things, like MY site.
I dont think you have anything to worry about shoe because your branded baby. Type in traffic is the best.
thats crazy… its the beauty or curse of the internet depending on how you look at it
This is Darker than Black!
Wiki War is on and most of the SEO hate it. Google Is giving love to WIKI because Link Love is one of the most important ranking factor. I am pretty sure Google is doing some thing for this. As we all know Google is Years ahead in planning.
yeah i was sure this would be a bad thing to do on a search result you want to link to your site
I agree. Generally, I find wikipedia very useful *BUT* as an SEO/SEM I wish it was given less weight in the SERPs.
It is wack, I don’t rely on it.
I hate wiki
Dunno how I missed this. Hmmm, I’ll give it a watch now. Seems like a lot of people enjoyed this vid
I use Wikipedia ALOT for starting up quick traffic to sites. You’d be suprised how many hits you can get from adding external links to relevant categories.
Wikipedia it’s a very useful source to find articles about thing you might never know about it.
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