Wikipedia

In the future, will Wikipedia compete with every information site on the 'net?

Wikipedia is already my largest competitor and it's growth seems unstoppable.

The quality of the content on Wikipedia (in the areas in which I compete) is extremely high.

Wikipedia is causing me to seriously re-evaluate my business model of providing good information free and monetizing it through advertising.

 

yes, wikipedia is also top ten on my main keywords.... He is already grabed many kW with good postion on serp level.....

 

And the worst is that they take information from many sources and I have heard that they began to add the rel=nofollow attribute to the outgoing links so you cannot benefit in any way :O

 

It does get quite high rankings on Google as well. Quite popular and very prone to abuse. The popularity stems from the fact that it's free and offers same type of information as Encarta or other paid online encyclopedia.

It does not limit itself to information sharing but now it tends to expand to shopping sites. Seems like "wiki" is becoming a popular domain name component just like "seo" recently or "e-" in the dotcom boom.

 

Promotion of Wikipedia in serp has twofold advantage to Google.
!) Google cares about the quality of the topic and rank it better so that searcher can get right content.And wikipedia fulfill the requirment to rank high.
@) Competitors (mostly) cannot compete with such giant websites so they must find some other way to rank high and that way is "adwords".

 

Yes, its a huge problem for content site owners.

The question is - what can be done about it?

 

My take: make WikiPedia your friend. It's fairly simple if you have access to specialized knowledge. Just remember to focus on CONTENT not ADS. It's okay to have ads but let the specialized content be the MAIN attraction of your site.

In essence, that's Wikipedia's advantage over 'general information' site. It's pages are not filled with PPC ads and other stuff that could put off a user looking for resource info. It's increasingly hard to compete against Wikipedia based on this "resource info" model. THERE IS, however, a way to benefit from Wikipedia if you have access to specialized or "custom" info. There is a way for your site to become a resource instead of a spam trap.

Some approaches:

Specialized content
Deep content verticals
Link collections to other resources

Wikipedia is a VOLUNTARY effort and volunteers don't have as much time re content generation as YOU do. So put in a little more effort in terms of research and content quality.

 

I wonder how much wikipedia will make if they started putting adsense?

And if they starting doing revenue sharing with writers, it will grow faster than one can imagine

 

wikipedia is a SERP monster. it shows up on the 1st page for almost any good KW. I have seen some webmasters successfully get on a Wikipedia page, but usually it's short term. The long term ones are very, very subtle. The best way to get on Wikipedia is to write your own page. But even then, one of their editors that specialize in the area will come in and rewrite it or expand it greatly and eliminate any of your outgoing links. Wikipedia's editors are very good, and the writing and information is usually top-notch, well-researched content. They are also meticulous about their outbound links.

 

Wikipedia editors have been really good about linking to my sites. I just found another link from Wikipedia the day before yesterday -- and I didn't even feel that my page was good enough to be linked to!

 

Yeah, a million and a half registered users isn't nearly enough.
/sarcasm

The post from webmasterlabor.com has some good suggestions. Basically you shouldn't worry about losing market share if you have quality content that exceeds what can be covered in a Wikipedia page. It's only the thinly-veiled made-for-adsense "content site owners" that have to worry.

 

congrats. those are very valuable.

 

I do not agree. It's anyone with an information site that is encyclopedia-like.

 

An encyclopedia-like site is no small undertaking, so I'd say what's out there ranges from large commercial sites to large made-for-adsense sites, with no in between*.

Large commercial sites such as Webopedia.com (which has been around for a while) are still doing pretty well. If wikipedia eventually leads to the demise of those kinds of sites, I'll admit that would be a shame. However, on the other side of things, I won't shed a tear if MFA sites lose out to wikipedia.

* Do you have any examples of the "in between"?

 

There's ways to COEXIST and cooperate with wikipedia. It doesnt necessarily have to be a competitor.

 

There is no shortage of niche' encyclopia-like sites that are losing traffic to Wikipedia.

 

Let's face it: In most cases a Wikipedia article IS the authority. This is what Google sees as well, underlined by the "define:..." search results in most cases.
in my opinion, if you find your topic eaten by Wikipedia, you should focus on creating expert knowledge content. Competing with wiki on the same content level just seems to be impossible from my point of view, just based on the vast amount of links and high quality content.

 

Hopefully Google buys them heheheheeh

 

Which a Wikipedia editor will just re-word and place on Wikipedia.

 

i remember reading about google tried to partner with wikipedia but wikipedia reject.