Ever notice that user generated contents such as Wikipedia are now dominating most of the organic search results?
I don’t mind seeing Wikipedia results if I need some encyclopedic information on such topics as Martin Luther King or something technical as the Index of Economic Freedom. But chandeliers? Or ovens? Or carpets?
I have just moved houses (hence the spotty posting last week for which I apologize) and I am currently shopping for many home decor items. I go to Google and see that Wikipedia is ranked #3 for carpets, #2 for chandelier, and #1 for oven!!! When searching for chandelier, I am not interested in learning about the history of chandeliers, but I want to buy one. Wikipedia is giving me useless stuff (ok, it’s not the fault of Wikipedia but the search engines that give it top rankings for every term on the planet).
Don’t get me wrong, I like Wikipedia. But I am not too happy of the way it is dominating the search engines, even for searches I feel that it should not. Wikipedia gets millions of links and the sheer number of sites linking to it gives the signal (however false) that it is indeed an authority site, hence should be ranked high.
So what can small and home business owners do to beat this giant of a resource? How can your organic search efforts pay off when Wikipedia is there ready to bump you out of the first page?
- Increase your pay per click advertising – if you can’t be seen in the organic search results, then a way to be visible on the first page of the search engine results is to increase your search marketing. It’s an additional expense, but hey, you can deduct it as a business expense next year from your taxes!
- Get your pages on Wikipedia – if you can’t fight them, join them! Try to find a way to integrate your pages in relevant areas of Wikipedia. There is always a section called External Links where you can put your link, although it is best if you can integrate your link into the main content. Be warned though: Wikipedia editors are quick to remove what they think as commercial links. But if you can hang on to your link in Wikipedia, you can reap the rewards of higher traffic.
- Work on your links – ok, you may not be able to approximate Wikipedia’s link structure, but you can still improve your rankings if you continue to get links from quality and authority sites in your niche
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