Wikipedia has been a real PITA in the SERPs this last week after the latest G algo tweak.
Thought we could brainstorm some possible ways to knock off a wikipedia listing:
1) Become a wikipedia writer, rewrite article and while improving, use your ninja thesaurus skills and replace keywords where possible (may knock out some long tail)
2) Negative link building
The pisser is it has such domain authority that it is playing right into where the G algo has been heading. I am not sure what to do about their dominance on the core head terms except for some really aggressive negative link building to try to knock out external anchors wherever possible.
Thoughts? Successes?
Fail here. Been a long time ago, but at least I can say that my stuff was good enough that Big Jim himself had to weigh in and tell the hive to nuke it.
I'm thinking it'll be even harder on the inside now. They've had all sorts of shakeups and quality pushes over the last 2 years. That's according to articles I've read, not firsthand sources. Besides, I doubt you could write out the kws and have it stick.
That leaves negative.
but don't they get a handjob? I suspect it would overrule normal link patterns - I know that in a couple of SERPs which cause me problems they're not there on links (to that page) specifically, as I have .gov .ac.uk's galore and a fair volume of quality stuff and they're still there.
I'm almost sure that for certain types of queries they return wikipedia at 2 unless there's a google blog they can use instead.
>certain types of queries they return wikipedia at 2
That's what I'm seeing fairly consistently.
Quotehand job
There are some interesting things going on right now with domain authority and some other factors that are trumping anchor text (even for old sites with great anchor text). I think some of the wikipedia bump I have seen the last week is related to this but not totally sure yet - http://th3core.com/talk/traffic/seobook-google-ranking-internal-pages-rather-than-home-pages/
I have one serps where I guarantee the top site is only there on exact domain/keyword match. Some of what Aaron describes may be in part keywords in the domain, I think. Although a domain authority tweak makes some sense, it still doesn't feel like it explains wikipedia rankings, unless someone has said "wikipedia deserves to rank for everything' certainly as a domain its not more relevant to most keywords it ranks for than a lot of what it outranks....
I am seeing a lot of newspapers ranking for non news queries in the UK now (especially financial, and mostly quality broadsheets) so there might be some type of 'unbiased resource' list which gets a boost?
>> lot of newspapers ranking
>> 'unbiased resource' list
Heh, then why doesn't Fox News get #1 for everything? ;)
To be fair, the UK newspapers have started hiring actual SEOs to do SEO work now. A few people I know have gone to work for various ones. Maybe they just aren't as far behind the curve as they used to be
I know a guy that knows a guy who does really nice Wikipedia listings for people. He has a long time editing history and knows how to create a company or personal profile that sticks. Let me know if you ever need some stardust or in face a nice company listing ;)