How to Sabotage the Competition in Wikipedia
April 21, 2006 · Print This Article
Wikipedia editors need to be aware of some of these insidious schemes that the less ethical search engine marketers are doing. After my last post about Wikipedia, I hope there are some editors keeping an eye on what I’m writing. My last attempt at communicating was a bit clumsy, but I do believe I got my message across.
It’s amazing what some of these guys are coming up with, to take advantage of Wikipedia. I saw this tip at Digitalpoint’s forum. Dominic is explaining how to channel “link juice” when you get one of your link spams to “stick” in Wikipedia. Do a search of Wikipedia for your selected keyword, and make internal links of that keyword back to the page where you got your spam stuck. That increases the effect of your spam link with the search engines.
How do you use that against your competition? According to Dominic, if your link doesn’t stick, but your competition’s did, you can sabotage them by doing the reverse; to remove all internal links within Wikipedia pointing to that page. This would have the effect of lowering the value of the link out to the competition.
He also notes that the aspiring Wikipedia link spammer should not place Adsense on the landing page of the link. Is there a prejudice against Adsense in among Wikipedia spam fighters?
Spammers are quite creative, aren’t they?
The way that this works, as far as I can work out, is that you add a valid external link to an article, then internally wikilink as many other pages as possible to that one article that has the external link. Google then adds extra weight to the external link because there are so many internal Wikipedia pages that link to the Wikipedia article that contains the external link.
I think perhaps that this is something it might be worthwhile for Google to consider tweaking their algorithm for Wikipedia. It would be best for the algorithm to note that external links on the site should not be given undue weight based on how many other articles link to that one article with the external link.
TBSDY
Wikipedia is soon going by way of blogs soon. What a waste. It seems that anything good that comes out, spammers would soon use for their own “evil” intentions.
Peter,
thanks for making cambridge seo meetup group last night.
Just checking out your blog again, great point. we try to define our name of Pingo and it was removed right away from editors. no tricks just wanted to explain our brand.
Thats a site that if you earned a true link. The community really did vote you in and that power of the link has got to show.
-Brian
Boston SEO Meet up
http://seo.meetup.com/50
Thanks, I’m looking forward to next month, myself. Bring up Wikipedia, if you want, we could certainly have a good discussion on it.