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wikipedia is wikidy wikidy wikidy whack!

Posted August 18th, 2007 by Jeremy Schoemaker

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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44 comments. What say you?

  1. Good Comment?
    webkinzpro.com

    http://www.webkinzpro.com chat with all the people the love WebKinz and get all the info you need to know about webkinz wiki bands use if you usse one link

  2. Good Comment?
    KiwiPulse

    Wikipedia it’s a very useful source to find articles about thing you might never know about it.

  3. Good Comment?
    Nick Sullivan

    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.

  4. Good Comment?
    Modern Worker

    Dunno how I missed this. Hmmm, I’ll give it a watch now. Seems like a lot of people enjoyed this vid

  5. Good Comment?
    Joeychgo

    I hate wiki

  6. Good Comment?
    STUART Hannig

    It is wack, I don’t rely on it.

  7. Good Comment?
    Paul Bradish

    I agree. Generally, I find wikipedia very useful *BUT* as an SEO/SEM I wish it was given less weight in the SERPs.

  8. Good Comment?
    Nathan H

    yeah i was sure this would be a bad thing to do on a search result you want to link to your site

  9. Good Comment?
    stupid 3gp

    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.

  10. Good Comment?
    Cristián

    This is Darker than Black!

  11. Good Comment?
    CPA Affiliates

    thats crazy… its the beauty or curse of the internet depending on how you look at it :)

  12. Good Comment?
    James

    I dont think you have anything to worry about shoe because your branded baby. Type in traffic is the best.

  13. Good Comment?
    cooliojones

    I would outsource this for someone else to do while I focus on other things, like MY site. :D

  14. Good Comment?
    feralcat

    The problem with this tip for me is that I consider Wikipedia itself to be my “enemy” in most cases.

  15. Good Comment?
    PrintnPost

    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

  16. Good Comment?
    Billy

    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.

  17. Good Comment?
    Coin Counter

    You give the wiki article for sun plenty on internal links form other related wiki articles like ’stars’, ’solar system’, ‘moon’, etc.

  18. Good Comment?
    Coin Counter

    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

  19. Good Comment?
    Coin Counter

    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.

  20. Good Comment?
    TeeCeo

    Neat little trick. I guess I would have to agree with rand that it is a Dick thing to do:).

  21. Good Comment?
    ShoeMoney

    yes thats what your not getting. It has nothing to do with your site. You dont have to even have a site.

  22. Good Comment?
    Side-Line Music Magazine

    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?

  23. Good Comment?
    Gecko Tales

    If anyone wants to make me a Wikipedia page feel free.
    Paul – Your are correct about it being overranked in the serps.

  24. Good Comment?
    Trevor McNotDonald

    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?

  25. Good Comment?
    papaman

    “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!

  26. Good Comment?
    What is going on, blog

    ’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!

  27. Good Comment?
    Paul.

    I enjoy wikipedia but it’s way over-ranked in the Serps

  28. Good Comment?
    My Awesome Blog

    Interesting, but a little confusing… do you link to the wikipedia page for sun or the google search results page for sun?

  29. Good Comment?
    Jonathan Volk

    LOL! :D Thanks for the video. I gotta try this in niches I failed at ^_^

    Not like I’m bitter or anything :P ;)

  30. Good Comment?
    KinzParty.com

    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.

  31. Good Comment?
    ***V***

    What a clever idea. I’m putting it into place right now :)

  32. Good Comment?
    Click Input

    Dang Wikipedia is overpowered… what are Google doing!?

  33. Good Comment?
    Travel Notebook

    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

  34. Good Comment?
    sundaybrew

    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

  35. Good Comment?
    Sami

    isn’t this like giving a weapon to everyone, and then telling them never to use it?

  36. Good Comment?
    Paul.

    I found the end the most interesting. Recently I’ve only been focused on external links and haven’t paid any attention to internal.

  37. Good Comment?
    graywolf

    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 …

  38. Good Comment?
    ShoeMoney

    ya.. your confused. the point is wikipedia will push down your enemies results because of its authority.

  39. Good Comment?
    Trevor McNotDonald

    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 :)

  40. Good Comment?
    Sabrina's Money Matters

    Love the title, I just said that very line yesterday talking about the new “wiki juice stand” that opened locally…LMAO

  41. Good Comment?
    Trevor McNotDonald

    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?

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