Get Wikipedia Links that Stick
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.
Do you do more than one page on a site? Or would that be overkill?
Yeah, I do. I haven’t done more than 2 or 3, though. But I can’t see how it could really hurt.
Have you found this works as well on non-blog sites as it does on blog sites?
The company I used to work for created/copied some simple, but effective javascript tools for their niche. I was able to wikipedia the shit out of those with ease. Short of that, I haven’t felt any wiki love since.
Also, obviously this is a long term move since you’re not going to target a landing page with a wiki link, but how quickly/dramatic of a movement have you seen on your root domain/other landing pages due to a wiki link to a deep page?
Interested to hear you experience.
The vast majority of my sites are built with WordPress, but a lot of them only use static pages. So, if you consider those non-blog sites, then yeah I do that all the time.
The time it takes to make a difference of course will vary by how often the wiki in question is crawled and how much authority it has. I haven’t done any isolated testing to get data on how it affects the home page ranking, but organic traffic to that particular page almost always increases.
And let’s not rule out the possibility of linking to your home page to begin with. Takes a little more creativity, but definitely doable.
Thank you for sharing this. What types of interviews or publications do you find don’t stick?
Ballsy is right, cudos to you…especially if you’re able to come back in with affiliate links on your reference link. Sweet!
Not having much luck with Wikipedia – tried linking to hubpages and articles in Ezinearticles I have created on topics but do not get published as on Wikipedia’s black list.