Because I know someone is going to mention it, yes I understand that wikipedia’s external links are no-followed. However, I believe in the significance of no-follow about as much as I believe in the significance of Captain Planet. Moving on…

In case you’ve been living under a rock (with no wi-fi), the beauty of wikipedia is that most all pages can be edited by anybody. Of course, this makes it a substantially less credible resource than many people believe it to be, but the search engines absolutely love it. Google in particular attributes a hefty amount of rank to thousands of wikipedia pages.

It is in your best interests to have a link to your site(s) from a wikipedia page, especially a prominent one. Not only will it bring in varying amounts of referral traffic, but it can also provide a huge boost in ranking. You can lecture about no-follow attributes until you’re blue in the balls, but I’ve tested this on quite a few sites and the results are always positive (providing you use proper anchor text and you can get the link to stick)…

Your Enemy
Close cousins of the Craigslist flaggers, wikipedia editors take great pride in their thankless work. Try adding a link to your poker site on the wikipedia page for poker and see how fast it is removed by some anonymous cyber hall monitor, and then you’ll have a better understanding of this obstacle. What they don’t like are links to sites full of advertisements or affiliate links/products. What they do like are “resource” sites (i.e. sites that appear to provide free information).

Your Solution
Your link is most likely to be audited within hours or even minutes of your posting it. Simply remove the ads on the page you’re linking to, make sure there is relevant info there (pertaining to the page you just linked it from), and let it sit that way for a day or two. After it has stuck for a couple days, it’s safe to say it’s not likely to be removed for a while. At this point you could do one of two things:

1. Leave it alone and hope visitors click through to other monetized pages on your site.
2. Monetize the poop out of it.

Of course, on VERY high profile wikipedia pages, links are checked more often than others, so the lifespan of #2 may be limited. However, I’ve got nicely rooted wikipedia links that have been up for months that regularly push traffic to pages on my sites with ads/aff links, etc.

If you’re still skeptical about the power of wikipedia links, you should probably try it for yourself and see what happens. Remember to use whatever anchor text you’re trying to rank for whenever possible, but try to keep it looking legit. Ahite?