links from wikipedia

do they count

[briggidere]

hi all,

i have a quick question you may be able to help me with. i was just looking at wikipedia, and you are able to edit the page to add external links. do these links carry much weight or do you think they are of little value due to you being able to get them so easily?
do moderators come and edit the links that are posted on there?

any help appreciated. cheers in advance.

briggidere

[Gorilla]

Moderators edit links that are not posted on relevant pages. Expect to be edited away if the page/site you are linking to is not strictly relevant.

Wikipedia delivers visitors and has value in this respect.

In my experience linking from Wikipedia does not influence SE ranking much.

[moishe]

links have the no follow attribute so they are useless for SE's that honor the tag. That having been said, I see some traffic from a link to one of my sites that someone put in Wiki..

[trillianjedi]

links have the no follow attribute

Most of them don't use that tag (eg Wikipedia doesn't).

I get a lot of traffic from Wiki's - they're worth being in, especially the larger ones.

do moderators come and edit the links that are posted on there?

Regularly. If your link is removed, forget it and move on.

TJ

[moishe]

ah, sorry, the link to my site is from wikitravel which does use the nofollow, also Ithought I read a thread last year that indicated that wiki would use the nofollow attribute on all links.

[trillianjedi]

ah, sorry, the link to my site is from wikitravel which does use the nofollow

You're right to highlight it and, of course, at any time in the future the main Wiki's could start using that tag, especially if spam becomes a major problem.

[physics]

Hmmm if all of the wikis use nofollow is that 'fair' to the links that are actually high quality and relevant? If they want to use nofollow they should at least allow links that have been reviewed by mods to be non-nofollow (especially since often text is grabbed from the pages linked to).

[Veeru]

Nice Information!

[pmkpmk]

Not all language branches of Wikipedia use nofollow.

[zCat]

The English language Wikipedia certainly doesn't use nofollow.

I regularly monitor a set of pages I'm interested in, and the fight against gratuitous linkspam now accounts for the majority of my edits, especially as the Wiki software makes it easy to "track" someone as they make changes.

Travel and hotel related sites seem to be the worst offenders. I remember one joker who tried to add a link to some flight discounter to every airport entry, and did it in alphabetical order. By the time he'd got to C, his 50 or previous edits had been reverted by myself and others, and he obviously realised it was a waste of his time (not to mention everyone elses).

In short: don't add your own site(s) to Wikipedia, make them good enough that they will get added by someone else.

[pmkpmk]

A Wikipedia entry about your own company or your own products (yes, this IS possible without spamming WP) is worthy even if the Wikipedia branch it's in uses nofollow.

The reason why it is worthy is the exposure you get. Wikipedia entries are usually among the top 5 in SERPS. Even if the link to your homepage is nofollowed or even if there is no link at all, it produces additional stickyness for web surfers.

Dedicated articles for a company or a product need to have a real-life foundation and significance. The company should have been around for a while, their products should be original, visionary, unique or market-leading. I would NOT try to create a Wikipedia article for a 6 month old 1 person company producing screensavers for Windows...

[zCat]

I'm not sure on the current guidelines, but generally commercial entries added by people directly involved in the subject do get treated with a great deal of suspicion, and very many end up on this page:
[en.wikipedia.org...]

which might not be quite the positive effect one is looking for ;-).

[zCat]

<snip>

[edited by: trillianjedi at 12:06 pm (utc) on Jan. 27, 2006]
[edit reason] See sticky [/edit]

[pmkpmk]

This is certainly true. Again, it depends on the quality and relevance:

• If your company was the one to first introduce a major achievement of general interest, and if you write an unbiased, fact-loaden non-promotional article about it, then I see no reason why this should not be kept in WP.
  
• If your company was just the first to DISTRIBUTE aforementioned product in - say - Elbonia, an article would be less called for, unless this distribution had major social/economic/cultural effects.
  
• If your company produces one of the 700 clones of the aforementioned product, an article would have very little chance to survive for long.

To be in a spot like this, you do not need to be among the Microsofts, Adobes, Vodafones, DaimlerChryslers of the world. Niche areas are also very valid and may deserve a permanent entry.