Like most of my ideas for posts, this one came from a thread on Wickedfire. My response there was short, but don’t worry, I have reserved my unnecessarily detailed and long-winded response for my blog!

First off, I know there are still some of you that don’t understand the value of Wikipedia links. I’m not even going to try to convince you otherwise. You’re better off just changing your mind right now and going with it. Yes, they will bear the “nofollow” attribute. If you don’t believe in the power of nofollow links (especially from an authority page), then you may return to digital point and go about your business.

Also, let’s not forget that in many cases, a well-placed Wikipedia place will result in targeted referral traffic.

Okay, so here are the simplified steps:

1) Find a recent, relevant news publication. I prefer interviews, because you can include a quote from the interview in the Wikipedia page you’re targeting.

2) Post this story on your site. A re-written copy will have a better chance of success, but I’ve also had links to stories I just copy + pasted stick for months and months (with no end in sight).

3) Do not put any ads/affiliate links on this page.

4) Place your link using proper formatting as a reference. If you don’t know how to properly format a Wikipedia link, see their documentation on this subject.

5) Do not do this repeatedly from the same IP within a short period of time.

After the dust has settled (perhaps a month or so), you may want to get a little ballsy and put ads/affiliate links on the page. Or, if you want to be more conservative about it, just enjoy the visitors you receive and the SE credibility of having sticky inbound links from Wikipedia.

Yes, Wikipedia does have editors. Some of them take more pleasure than others in being hall monitors and looking for links to delete. Also, pages related to certain high-competition niches are monitored a bit closer than others, since they are frequent spam targets. Try to find creative ways to fly under the radar. There are currently nearly 76 million Wikipedia pages indexed on Google, so, they can’t find everything. And even if they do, if you have followed the steps above, your link has the best chance of not being cock-blocked.

Oh, and one more tip…internal linking on Wikipedia is obviously very important and powerful. It’s also a lot easier to get away with dropping a link to another Wikipedia page than it is to an external site. So, if you don’t have any luck getting a link to stick on the high-profile page you’re originally targeting, you might want to consider dropping the link on a related but less desirable/less monitored page. That should be easier to stick, and once it does, you can work on building backlinks to the page from other, more authoritative Wikipedia pages to enhance the power of your link.

Okay. That’s all. More beer now.

I’m sure you’re wondering why the hell I would be using GoDaddy in the first place, since they are notoriously awful. Well, I was helping a friend with his business website that happened to be on a GoDaddy shared hosting account. Seeing as how all I needed to do was install WordPress on a subdomain and put the blog there, I figured not much could go wrong.

To save myself some time, I decided to use their auto-install. Anyone who has ever used Fantastico! or any similar script to install software on their sites knows it is usually quick and painless. Well, apparently this simple job is a 10 man operation over at GoDaddy that takes several days to complete.

I will now post a screenshot of my correspondence with a couple different GoDaddy representatives on Twitter. I had to do a little copy + pasting to get them in the correct order and everything, but I assure you these have not been altered in any way.

I have several different hosting accounts with many providers, and I can honestly say this is the worst and most incompetent support I have ever received. Even foreign hosts that oversell their boxes and don’t even offer phone support would be able to take care of something as simple as this with a ticket submission.

And another thing that sucks about their support – the hold music. Yeah, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies were cool for like a week in like 1998 or something. Yes, there is an option to hold without music, but guess what? Their support never has any idea how to resolve your problem, so they put you on hold again. WITH MUSIC.

Anyway, for domains there is Namecheap. For hosting, there are more options than you could ever possibly sift through. If you are that 1% of my readers who don’t already avoid them, this post is for you. Stay away from GoDaddy. And feel free to link to this post with some GoDaddy hosting type anchor text so that my few days of frustration will not have been in vein.

Just in case you were wondering, GoDaddy never made any attempt to offer any sort of service solution. Too bad. I was hoping for a .CO registration coupon code for 3% off.