| $5 submissions |
11-20-2007 03:07 PM |
The DARK SIDE of Wikipedia
Even though wikipedia employs rel=no follow tags, it still has some benefits. Here's an interesting article on why people still edit wikipedia despite the "lack" of link juice/link love.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-dark-side-of-wikipedia
Why Edit Wikipedia Pages if There's No Link Juice?
* Reputation Management - if Wikipedia has bad things to say about a topic, there will almost certainly be someone who wishes to see that information removed.
* Link Traffic - Wikipedia articles, due to their phenomenal overrepresentation in search engines, can drive a remarkable amount of traffic, so many wiki-hacks are simply attempts to boost click-throughs
* Promotion - If you were a cellphone company, you might seriously consider editing the Wiki article on cellphone retailers, possibly adding a link to a list of "highest rated" stores by consumers according to a bogus study you host on your site (or another site) and then copying that list in short-format on the Wikipedia entry. Other promotional tactics are less obvious, but often more difficult to identify. And, yes, that story is a modified version of a true instance of Wiki-promotion.
* To Spite - If your competitor is ranking ahead of you on Google, or kicking you around in sales, you might find that Wikipedia is an excellent place to create a page on their company and detail the long list of terrible misdeeds they've committed. What's great (or horrible) about this practice is that generally, they'll be the ones who later come in and look like spammers for erasing the content or trying to have it removed, which actually helps to bolster the veracity of information in the eyes of other editors or administrators. It's a dirty but highly effective tactic to leverage against an opponent. I've even heard a story about using this technique for blackmailing the company referenced in the negative article, and pretending to "switch sides" in the editorial debate on the talk page once the money had been paid (it's DMOZ all over again!).
* For Link Juice - Wait, I thought there was no link juice on Wikipedia... Well, not directly. But, Wikipedia is such a reference resource that if your site earns links on popular pages, you'll find that those links find their way into forums, blog posts, articles, and journalistic publications more often than not. This is probably one of the most clever ways to use Wikipedia, because you'll need to link to something worthy of being spread, anyway, which probably means that even a heavy-handed Wiki-editor won't remove it, as it's typically relevant enough and interesting enough to belong there. One might even argue that this isn't Wiki-Hacking at all (perhaps it's the linkbait of Wikipedia?).
* To Earn Credit - The Wikipedia hierarchy rewards frequent, positive edits, and for many Wiki-hackers this is a great way to build up a solid, respectable-looking profile and potentially even be rewarded with administrator status.
* Wiki-Jacking - Since I've written about this topic previously, I won't cover it again in-depth.
|
