Wikipedia for SEO
What are the best ways to use Wikipedia for SEO? We asked SEO consultant Nate Fishman to weigh in on the benefits and strategies for Wikipedia for organic search.
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What Are The Benefits of Using Wikipedia for SEO?
Often underutilized for organic search, Wikipedia offers many SEO benefits. One benefit is the ability to drive referral traffic through citations and references. Depending on the page and the subject, there are strategies that can be implemented to increase the amount of referral traffic coming from Wikipedia.
Another benefit is using Wikipedia for brand awareness. An excellent example is Google’s knowledge panel, which often pulls information and data from Wikipedia to display on a Google search. Creating a Wikipedia page greatly increases the chances of a knowledge panel appearing and the amount of information displayed in a Google search.
How do Backlinks Work from Wikipedia?
There are two types of backlinks that Google crawls – do-follow and no-follow. With do-follow backlinks, Google provides credit for the “authority” passed from one site to another. With no-follow backlinks, that authority is discredited.
Large websites like Wikipedia are “nofollow” links. However, that does not mean there is no SEO benefit. Any time your website can drive traffic, that helps your site’s performance in Google searches. With a large site like Wikipedia, you can drive a lot of traffic – so while there are no direct benefits for SEO, the amount of referral traffic can create indirect benefits for SEO performance.
What are Some Strategies for using Wikipedia to Improve SEO?
There are many strategies that SEOs and digital marketers can use. Here are a few advanced strategies to consider regarding Wikipedia to improve SEO.
- Before adding a link or citation to a Wikipedia page, find the number of page views a Wikipedia page gets. This can be done right on Wikipedia. If the goal is to increase referral traffic, it’s worth seeing how many pageviews a page gets per month and whether it is increasing or decreasing.
- Create new pages based on keyword opportunity – is there a missing page with a topic with a lot of search volume? Creating a page on Wikipedia with high search volume and low competition (keyword difficulty) means you can drive significant traffic.
- Broken links – replacing Wikipedia broken links with a link to an article you published – or, if you do not have an article on a specific topic, create one and add it as a reference!