18 replies to this topic

[Michael Martinez]

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.

It depends on the topic, and I can assure you I know of plenty of topics at Wikipedia where spam and propaganda have been allowed to stay.

Right now, Wikipedia is a spammer's paradise. They are doing an awful job of policing the garbage and I expect the problem to get worse as more and more people recommend it as a useful or worthy resource.

[qwerty]

I actually edited the SEO page a few weeks ago, and my change is still there Ok, so it wasn't a link to my site (I changed "alt tags" to "alt attributes").

But it does seem to be true that Google's taking a while before it acknowledges new pages there. I created a page about a client of mine and linked to it from a couple of other pages after adding his name to them (all of them legitimate, by the way) and it took Google well over a month before the new page was indexed. As far as I can tell, the pages that link to the new page both get spidered pretty regularly, so the delay wasn't caused by googlebot failing to see the link.

I expect Wikipedia will expand the recent changes and make almost everything require approval before it goes live. If they don't, they're likely to lose their standing as an authoritative site.

[Randy]

I changed "alt tags" to "alt attributes"

OFFTOPIC:

Chris will lurve you forever for that correction Bob!

[Jill]

Last time I looked at some of the SEO pages in Wikipedia, there was so much to correct, that it would have been a full time job!

My son likes Wikipedia and has even added/edited some stuff there, but I really haven't looked at a whole lot of pages there. I personally don't trust any of the definitions just knowing how poor the pages about SEO are.