Remove Wikipedia from the Organic Listings
Recently Squidoo got hit with the Google authority whacking stick. They were “over ranking” for various terms and Google decided that they should be given less relevance in the search results. And of course as a result they were beaten down in the Google serps. So from Google’s point of view, when a website starts unduly influencing the search engine results, you adjust them so they fall back in line.
What I want to know is what about Wikipedia?!
Wikipedia is literally dominating search rankings across the board, and in more categories than any other single organization. Please understand, I am a Wikipedia fan. I think what they have built is absolutely amazing. They are the role model for what mass collaboration can do. And it’s a great resource. But it’s really grown out of control in the search engine results. They literally show up for everything now (rank position #7 in Google, 4 in Yahoo, 11 & 12 in MSN for “everything”).
The have so much authority that they can rank for whatever they want. And that’s fine and great. But given their size, isn’t it time to start treating them as a special case? Why doesn’t Google just make a special entry at the top of the search results for Wikipedia (like local search results)? They almost always show up anyway. Just add a line at the top of the page: Wikipedia has this to say about everything and they know it all.
Then…
Take them out of the organic listings completely!!!
By giving them their own special listing, if people are looking for more information they can visit Wikipedia. Everyone knows that Wikipedia is a good informational resource. But when they want to buy something why should Wikipedia show up in the search results? By taking Wikipedia out of the normal search engine results, the other people who are actually relevant to what the searcher is looking for are there where they belong.
And incase you were wondering, the Answer to the Ultimate Question about Life, the Universe, and Everything, is 42.
Posted: August 18, 2007 | Under: Articles
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12 Responses to “Remove Wikipedia from the Organic Listings”
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I agree completely; Wikipedia is a valuable resource, and I often use my Firefox toolbar to find information there. But to see it constantly outrank other valuable pages in the search results is frustrating after a while. I’m all in favor of it having an extra line across the top of a search page. This is creative thinking. Thanks for a good post.
Search engines are made for people. As long as people find the result on Wikipedia useful, they will continue to dominate.
I can’t agree more – I find wikipedia useful as well but i don’t see there being much point in having pages rank all over the place. Particularly for commercial/sales driven queries.
You might find this useful:
http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/search-google-without-wikipedia-a-firefox-search-plugin/
[...] Remove Wikipedia from the Organic Listings : Cory Sessions SEO Blog What I want to know is what about Wikipedia?!Wikipedia is literally dominating search rankings across the board, and in more categories than any other single organization. Please understand, I am a Wikipedia fan. I think what they have built is absolutely amazing. They are the role model for what mass collaboration can do. And it’s a great resource. But it’s really grown out of control in the search engine results. They literally show up for everything now (rank position #7 in Google, 4 in Yahoo, 11 & 12 in MSN for “everything”). [...]
Wikipedia used to do really badly in Google. If you searched on a piece of article text, you’d see several Wikipedia mirrors before the original listing …
I agree with you all the way. I don’t necessarily think they should be removed but they rank too well for way too many topics. I recently did an extensive study on Wikipedia ranking for the top terms: Wikipedia Rankings They rank in the top 10 for the top 1800 or so terms 70% of the time. That’s a little extreme.
Wikepdia is sometimes valuable at the same time it a
remain of dictatorial control capitalism and its not allowing other op ions at all: therefore Wikepedia is a possible danger for organizations and the free word. The thought control mechanism does not allow other opinions. The so called proof Wikepedia is using can be questioned. Wikepdia does not allow other opinions and is heavily colored in a Political Correct way of thinking (mostly authoritarian non democratic way of working) People working on Wikepedia are trying to influence the public opinion. Read also the book
lying with statistics. Its a company and they are after power and money!!
I disagree on one point- Wikipedia is NOT useful. It is an utterly useless, inaccurate unsource of uninformation that will only contribute to the degeneration of our world and to anti-intellectual, hell, just plain anti-accuracy. I want to remove it from all search engines and I would NEVER use it, NEVER. It is run by fascists and contrary to what you state and what many believe, it is not a collection of info by the masses but rather info by some obsessive-compulsive, psychotic few usually ignorant maniacs with nothing to do but revert changes and write irrelevant, propagandistic and inaccurate nonsense and pass it off as facts by the masses.
anti-intellectualism
“obsessive-compulsive, psychotic few usually ignorant maniacs with nothing to do but revert changes”
Very true Sara.
It’s interesting, I have been researching semantic web indexing. And when you start getting into that area, you can find something really useful for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a good baseline. The templates that are used to structure the information in the encyclopedia can be used to create real world associates.
That sounds really abstract… but basically, because Wikipedia deals with real world “things” like people, places, things, pop-culture etc., you can use that as a baseline to teach machines to understand associations and interlink related data.
So, while it is still really annoying to see it ranking for “everything” (Currently at #5 in Google), it does have some good uses.
Wikipedia has there organic act together. They make great use of keywords in Titles, URL’s, Content, H1 Tags and Meta Tags! If other companies worked on there organic indexing this would not be an issue!