using Wikipedia articles with AdSense

[loner]

Are there adverse consequences from using wikipedia articles with adsense?

[celgins]

1. You won't know if the Wikipedia articles are valid or truthful

2. You would probably be infringing upon someone's copyrights.

3. Your Adsense ads would be better targeted with unique (not duplicated) content

[vincevincevince]

Adverse? No. But that's not to say that you'd be successful.

[zett]

Where is the point in creating a Wikipedia clone of some sorts?

Others have done this before. The major problem seems to be to attract enough traffic to become financially interesting. Thus, you probably need to buy traffic. But if you are buying traffic on Adwords/Adsense, you might be seen as "MFA" by Google and get zapped. Happened on June 1st to a couple of publishers.

Maybe if you elaborate your plans a bit more, we might help you better?

[iwannano1]

Noop it won't work, wikipedia article will be always 1st on search, following by other language on wikipedia.

Next it will show answers.com article as it mix 3-4 sources.

Next it will show other users article copied from wikipedia but edited for their own usage

Finally you will be there on 100th search result.

If I were you, I will write my own stuff

[jomaxx]

3. Your Adsense ads would be better targeted with unique (not duplicated) content

Clearly not true and a spurious argument.

Personally I don't see much risk, although I also don't think it's a great idea for a website, if that's all it's going to be.

[HuskyPup]

Are there adverse consequences from using wikipedia articles with adsense?

Are you:

1. Implying a mini cloned version of Wikipedi for a specific subject?

2. An existing site using specific Wikipedia information relevant to your site's subject?

If #2 then no problem and you may rank well for it if your site is already reasonably well known for that widget subject.

If #1 then it would most probably just appear to be a duplicate and be penalised accordingly.

YMMV!

[Green_Grass]

As Zett said, it is very difficult to rank well with Wiki articles only, so you have to BUY traffic. This is typical MFA behaviour and is arbitrage.

Arbitrage, as such, seem to be ok with G as long as you have a valid website with some unique and useful content which people bookmark and return to.

However, big G HAS BANNED accounts (in the past) indulging in pure arbitrage with duplicate useless content. However some websites do seem to escape this penalty at least for a while ( till maybe G catches up).

It may not be a good idea to take the risk..but ofcourse, it is your decision.

[deedee]

I had some wiki articles on my site, and I deleted them.
They didn't get any good number of hits.

The adsense clicks on them were very very low.

I now stick to orginal content.

[nomis5]

But can you live with yourself knowing that you make a living (which you won't) by exclusively copying other people's work? Surely it's morally, if not legally, wrong.

[jomaxx]

What's morally wrong about it? Wikipedia comes with an explicit license to reuse its articles. If you're talking about Wikipedia itself being immoral, I don't think most people would agree with you.

[potentialgeek]

> Wikipedia itself being immoral

It hurdles my site in SERPs... less traffic... fewer clicks... less income... Wiki is E-VIL! :->]

p/g

[martinibuster]

Surely it's morally, if not legally, wrong.

As someone else mentioned, it's free content, just like DMOZ. So there's no legal or moral issues involved. The only adverse consequences would be with regard to ranking, which is outside of the scope of this forum. If you want to know about that, you'll be better served by posting that question over in Search Engine Promotion Forum.

So to keep the discussion within the scope of this forum, wrt to the AdSense program, you may suffer low CTRand low EPC because the content, in general, probably isn't the best for selling products. As we all know, content about products and services are what do the best with AdSense. So if you're going to use their content, stick to that.

As far as discussions about arbitrage, that's not within the scope of the OP's post, but it's a legit concern, perhaps for another thread? The OP is simply asking about any adverse consequences for using Wikipedia content, not about methods for driving visitors to content.

[edited by: martinibuster at 3:13 am (utc) on Sep. 13, 2007]

[Go60Guy]

I think it's worth suggesting that some might just be interested in offering Wiki material as a service to their visitors without regard to ranking. I've done this and tossed AdSense on top of it. No adverse consequences at all under these circumstances. Not everything on a site has to be SEO'd. Shocking, huh?

[zett]

As far as discussions about arbitrage, that's not within the scope of the OP's post, but it's a legit concern

One of the "adverse consequences" of using Adsense with Wikipedia articles is that the articles have to be seen to earn money. The OP was NOT asking about general penalties or consequences, but specifically about using Wikipedia articles with Adsense.

Thus, it is only fair and well within the boundaries of this thread (IMO) to discuss possible issues when re-publishing Wikipedia articles. Whether or not the OP is MFA does not matter (I'll leave it to Google to decide that), but the facts stay the same - probably no/very little free SE traffic, therefor is otherwise aquired traffic needed, which can get 'im zapped from the program if he does not watch his step.

[loner]

I was wondering specifically if there were known penalties for Adsense (lowered click $) for ads running on pages that are duplicates of pages on Wikipedia.

I think I got my answer.

Since the site is already established in its niche, IF I chose to republish certain articles from wikipedia, about 1% of the existing content, the site would preform pretty much the same in regard to AdSense.

Thanks all.

There are concerns with the effect this would have with Google search. I've reposted the question;

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