18 replies to this topic

[jehochman]

I somehow have a PR5 Wikipedia user page. If I put some text about what my company does on my Wikipedia user page, and place a link to my company, how much value will that have?

Note: The Wikipedia community is hostile to SEOs placing promotional links in articles. However, on one's own user page any content or links are allowed.

[Jill]

You sure they're not automatically tagged with the no follow attribute?

[jehochman]

No such tags. Excellent thing to check. Not something I had considered.

[Jill]

Well I use a Firefox extension (SearchStatus) which enables you to highlight all nofollow attributes on all pages, and it seems when I'm at those types of sites most of the links are lit up like a christmas tree!

It's fun to see what people mark as "untrusted"!

[mal4mac]

Wikipedia used to have "no follow", but recently voted against having it. Maybe the older pages still have the no follow? Or maybe they've put it back in again. If you have an excellent content page I see nothing wrong with linking to it from a relevant Wikipedia page. Even if you don't get any SEO advantage you may get some traffic. I recently followed a thread by two Wikipedians having a major set-to over whether links to pages with AdSense ads should be allowed. One said no, and always deleted them; the other said yes, if the content was good content. The latter seemed to be winning (and rightly so!) Anyway, why not experiment? Wikipedia is a weird and wonderful environment worth dipping your toe into - and Google loves it.

[qwerty]

My user page is blank. I hadn't given any thought to it at all... hmm....

[MCinfo]

Great idea. Any idea how to get a userpage?

[qwerty]

As far as I know, all you have to do is join. All I know for certain is that I joined, created one new article, edited a couple of others, and linked the new one to the ones I edited, and I have a user page. I doubt all that other stuff I did had anything to do with it. I probably got the page just for joining.

But I'd be careful about using that page in a way that could be viewed as an abuse of the system. Wikipedia is trying to be more careful now after somebody published a page that claimed that a well-known journalist was partly responsible for the assassination of JFK, so I believe they're now having a staff member check edits (on at least some pages) before those changes are published. You don't want to use your page to do anything that's going to make it difficult for you to contribute properly there.

[MCinfo]

Yes you are probally right. How can we know for sure?

PS: What about posting links of your website on forums like for example this one which has a high HR? Does that influence someone's PageRank? If it would have influence on the PageRank then it would be rather smart to have the link of your website in your signature.

[Jill]

PS: What about posting links of your website on forums like for example this one which has a high HR? Does that influence someone's PageRank? If it would have influence on the PageRank then it would be rather smart to have the link of your website in your signature.

Our forum signatures are not seen by the search engines so that people don't "use" us to gain link popularity. (Lots of other threads on this topic here if you're interested you could do a quick forum search.)

[jonbaker]

I still haven't figured out how to upload an article on Wikipedia. Anyone know how?

[qwerty]

I don't know if there's any way to upload an article, but you should be able to create one there. A wiki is a kind of CMS, and it should allow you (assuming you're logged in) to edit pages and create new ones.

[CTPhil]

I still haven't figured out how to upload an article on Wikipedia.  Anyone know how?

From the homepage: click on "help", scroll down to "Modifying a Wikipedia page", click on "How to start a new page". You will arrive at "Help:Starting a new page", where you click on a link titled "m:Help:Starting a new page", fill in a page title in the box there and click the "Create Article" button. You are then ready to start typing.

Once you have created your article, you can find an appropriate page that already exists to place a link to it.

[Michael Martinez]

Wikipedia is currently a spammer's paradise. Enjoy it while you can. In about a year or so, Google should have implemented some sort of Wiki-adjustment to allow for all the garbage that gets posted there.

[jehochman]

Michael,

Google can check the length of time that a link persists in Wikipedia. For pages that have high traffic, spam links get deleted very quickly. The SEO page is a good example. Try posting a link there - it will be gone in minutes, and you'll get a spam warning on your user page. Wikipedia is a fairly good map to knowledge on the Internet, often better than Google.