Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Does Google penalize the websites black listed in Wikipedia due to spam regulations?
(See matts explanation there!)
Is anybody experienced?
I got my site blacklisted in wikipedia. If we mail administrators, is there any chance to get out of this?
If you do a search for [wikipedia spam blacklist], the first result is helpful. It gives pointers to various strings and urls that Wikipedia has blacklisted on their site.I’d characterize that list as much like a spam report: the data can be useful, but at least in Google it wouldn’t automatically result in a penalty (for the reason that site A might be trying to hurt site B).
So Google won't necessarily penalize you just because Wikipedia has you on the list. But they sure might take a close look - and do a human inspection even though their algo gives you a clean bill of health. My advice is to study Google's Guidelines and clean up in any area where you have been pushing it.
However, last year, a snarky competitor of our company added a bunch of bogus links to OUR site to Wikipedia, which resulted in our URL being put into a directory called Project Spam.
I hasn't impacted our traffic, but it is extremely annoying that now - when you do a Google search for our company - (due to Wikipedia's overall popularity apparently) a page titled Project Spam + our URL now comes out on page 1 of the results. VERY frustrating.
We're looking into our options, but I'm not sure there are any.
[en.wikipedia.org...]
asking someone to take a second look. Be prepared for hard questioning -- the wiki people get a lot of these requests and probably less than 30% of them are legit, so they tend to be very skeptical.
Do you have a Wikipedia account? If not, I suggest you get one for this.
Good luck!
(P.S. -- can you let us know what happens?
asking someone to take a second look.
Actually we tried that. Our question, posted on the talk page per their instructions, was never even answered.
One consolation - we apparently have a lot of company - Wikipedia has even set up a similar spam page for Google. Of course when you Google "google" THAT page doesn't show up on page 1!
Our question, posted on the talk page per their instructions, was never even answered.
I guess you could set up a subdomain of spam.yourwebsite.com and put your privacy policy etc there as a way to plead your case.
It also looks like sometimes they're flagging all of a domain-owner's domains and not just those put in their articles. One case I just looked at involved domains that were registered privately. I wonder how they can do that?
Even regulars can't go around and put external links in to thier sites. As soon as someone sees a few links showing up that look like a pattern they are likely to audit all of the recent edits by that user (or IP address) and purge their links out.
One more thing to remember, Wikipedia started using nofollow tags a while back, so your external links won't get you any search engine love. All you can hope for is that someone reading the article will choose to follow a link. This does not happen much with reference links unless the reader is wanting to research a specific point.
A search like: site:domain.com "some text to find"
is also returning several pages that are NOT from domain.com in the results.
The change has happened in the last 24 to 36 hours, or less.
Since we're talking about wikipedia here, I thought I would mention it in case it means something to someone.
