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How Wikipedia hurts small sites
Posted on January 24, 2007 - Filed Under Google News |
From Google Groups someone complains that their website ranking disappeared posting the following:
We were cruising right along, and all of a sudden we dropped off page 3-4 and can not find our main site anywhere. I can find other pages in the site, not really sure what is up. The site in question is www.supportdysautonomia.org. Can anyone tell me why I dropped so much…or off the map or even where I am at now?
Why do you think they might have “dropped off” in Google? That’s right, if you look at their few links they come from Wikipedia and Wikipedia is now using the nofollow tag.
So there is an example of how Wikipedia hurts small sites, it took me just a few seconds to find and I am sure there will be MANY others. Sad!
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January 25th, 2007 at 9:39 am
Seems kind of hypocritical to talk about how Wikipedia is hurting their site by nofollowing the links, then when you mention their name, you don’t even hotlink it.
Seems you’re hurting them too. Yea, that must be it. You, and Wikipedia together. Yep.
January 25th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Hi Aaron,
I saw your post on google groups regarding wikipedia & nofollow influence on google SERP.
If you have some time, please take a look at my site, coredownload.com . I’ve dropped from SERP about a week ago, and I haven’t been doing anything that I read is wrong. I had no WIKI links, so I basically have no idea what caused this. Please take a look, anything you notice will be appreciated.
Regards,
Florin
January 25th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Peter, that link is in a blockquote from Google Groups and my purpose is to not promote a site I do not really know much about other than why it dropped off the map.
You want to challenge me you must do better than this Peter. ;)
Florin - It took me a microsecond to figure it out, you have a link at the bottom of your site that is for an seo contest. Google is most likely becoming more ruthless with people who play these games. If you care about your site I would remove all reference to seo contests. Update: Had a moment to look again: You are also selling links for PageRank, it should not make you disappear but it shows intent that is against Google’s “guidelines”. :)
Aaron
January 25th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
“my purpose is to not promote a site I do not really know much about…”
Yet you’re suggesting that it should be Wikipedia’s purpose to promote a site that they really don’t know much about.
January 25th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Do you know what a blockqoute is Peter? When you make a blockquote it is duplicate content that you cut and paste from another website. That is all I did, if you would like me to take a look further at the site and link to it to bring it into Google’s regular index fine but accusing me of being “like wikipedia” is a stretch.
Wikipedia should have a better spam flagging system, for now they rely on humans but I am sure they can develop an algorithm. To nofollow all links because of a few spammers seems extreme, do you agree with this?
January 25th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
No, I don’t agree with it.
January 25th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Peter - I would like to better understand your argument, write up a post in you blog and I will take a look. :)
January 30th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
When I read Peter’s email, I thought he was being sarcastic by saying that if Wiki hurts someone’s website by not giving link love, then this blog (and every blog not linking to the site) did the same damage by not including a link. Obviously ridiculous.
IMHO Wiki deciding not to give link love isn’t what I would call “hurting” as much as I would call “not helping” your SERPs. It’s not Wiki’s job to help your SERPs. It’s their job to give quality information about a topic and provide useful links to relevant information.
Their past method of doing links encourages spam, and consequently decreases the quality of their pages. So they removed that method in the hopes of reducing spam and increasing quality updates. They are protecting their business model. Whether this effects a site’s SERPs is not their problem. If they decide to do it algorithmically in the future, that is great. But certainly not their prerogative.
In fact, if Wiki is the only place you can get a link, then your site probably isn’t any good anyway and shouldn’t rank well. If you have a quality site with solid links and you lose your Wiki link, then you shouldn’t see a change in your SERPs.