In the last 6 months, Wikipedia has become a staple for nearly every single search result on could possibly think of. I have noticed that for every client I work with Wikipedia is one of their largest competitors for natural search engine rankings.

In general I understand why Wikipedia’s natural search rankings are so powerful, because they have a tremendous about of links, they have links from nearly every single corner of the universe. Although I also think that this is an evil part of Google’s plan to mess with the natural search results, by allowing Wikipedia to rank so high for nearly every single search term on earth, they basically eliminate the opportunity for most small business’s to even attempt to attain top rankings, as it is a massive task to out rank Wikipedia for anything.

The question is if Google is really concerned with the user experience, then why would anyone searching for say laptops, want to see Wikipedia? Does that query result in many people who want to know definition of what a laptop is? I think not. The funniest one is the 100% default natural search engine result of number 1 for search engine optimization, the one and only Wikipedia.  I really believe that this is/was part of Google’s strategy, to mix up natural search, but I also think that they are hurting the user experience.

Now if one has the seo budget you can certainly outrank Wikpedia, but it does not come cheap, you probably need to be spending in excess of $10K per month to build an SEO program to our ranking the all mighty Wikipedia. So if when you do a search query for your top keywords, if you see Wikipedia above you know that it is going to be a long road to surpass the o Mighty Wikipedia.

Tags: search engine optimization, search engine ranking, wikipedia, wikipedia in natural search

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Searcn Engine Ranking, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.