Sure, Wikipedia’s done away with live external links, limiting some of their value to SEOs (and making me a much happier person), but there’s still an enormous amount of reputation management and links-for-traffic opportunities. Luckily, I’ve got a not-so-secret formula for how to add content and make changes to Wikipedia ethically and legitimately. But, first things first, let’s review a few of Wikipedia’s most important rules (I’m going to excerpt large chunks, as I believe these are valuable for would-be editors to understand):
A person is notable if he or she has been the subject of secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent,6 and independent of the subject. The depth of coverage of the subject by the source must be considered. If the depth of coverage is not substantial, then multiple independent sources should be cited to establish notability. Trivial, or incidental coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not sufficient to establish notability. Once notability is established, primary sources may be used to add content. Ultimately, and most importantly, all content must be attributable.
Notability for Organizations and Companies:
A company, corporation, organization, group, product, or service is notable if it has been the subject of secondary sources. Such sources must be reliable, independent of the subject and independent of each other. The depth of coverage of the subject by the source must be considered. If the depth of coverage is not substantial, then multiple independent sources should be cited to establish notability. Trivial or incidental coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not sufficient to establish notability. Once notability is established, primary sources may be used to add content. Ultimately, and most importantly, all content must be attributable.
The “secondary sources” in the criterion include reliable published works in all forms, such as (for examples) newspaper articles, books, television documentaries, and published reports by consumer watchdog organizations1 except for the following:
- Press releases; autobiographies; advertising for the company, corporation, organization, or group; and other works where the company, corporation, organization, or group talks about itself — whether published by the company, corporation, organization, or group itself, or re-printed by other people.
- Works carrying merely trivial coverage; such as (for examples) newspaper articles that simply report meeting times or extended shopping hours, or the publications of telephone numbers, addresses, and directions in business directories.
In keeping with Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a clear conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred from the tone of the edit and the proximity of the editor to the subject, are strongly discouraged. Of special concern are organizational conflicts of interest.[1] Failure to follow these guidelines may put the editor at serious risk of embarrassing himself or his client.
Wikipedia is “the encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, but if you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:
- editing articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with,
- participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors,
- linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam);
- and you must always:
- avoid breaching relevant policies and guidelines, especially neutral point of view, attribution, and autobiography.
If you have more questions about the editing rules at Wikipedia most likely to apply to an SEO’s activities there, I’d also highly recommend reading this Five Minute Introduction to Wikipedia for PR Professionals.
Now, on to my strategies – please note, this is a guide for certain folks – SEO shops, media relations firms, internal PR division, or anyone who wants to have considerable editing power at Wikipedia that can afford to dedicate time to Wikipedia work. If you can’t afford that commitment and have serious Wikipedia issues, I’d suggest contacting a social media marketing firm (there’s some good ones here):
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Step 1: Create a username profile and robustly, accurately describe yourself on your user page. Always use this when logging in (from home, work, on the road, etc). You’ll want every edit you make to be ascribed to your account.
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Step 2: Identify the pages you’d like to edit and use your watchlist to “watch” those pages for changes and updates.
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Step 3: Identify 5-10 stub articles in your industry that need attention. Visit these pages and spend some time improving the quality and quantity of content. Don’t promote yourself or anyone else – use Wikipedia’s NPOV (Neutral Point of View) rule.
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Step 4: Now that you’ve shown you’re reliable, try making some smaller edits to articles and participating in a few discussions on talk pages on subjects you’re knowledgable about – whether personal or professional.
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Step 5: You’ve got a robust profile at this point (at least robust enough not to be viewed as a spammer). Go back to those pages you identified in stage 2 that you really want to edit and post your changes, respectfully and logically on the talk page. You can even post links to an entire new version of the article in a sandbox if you’d like. Disclose in your piece your relationship to the party – “I work for them, I’m a friend of theirs, I’m the CEO’s son, etc.” – trust me when I say that the Wikipedians will eventually figure you out, so it pays to be honest and upfront about motivations.
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Step 6: Watch the talk pages and monitor discussion. 7/10 times, in our experience, the page gets changed with no questions asked – even links can be added if they’re not too obviously SEO’d or spammy. The rest of the time, you’ll need to have a back and forth with the other editors. In these cases, your position will be greatly strengthened by the history of your past edits. No other factor makes for a big reputation rise or fall at Wikipedia than edit history.
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Step 7: In the event that the page you want to create/edit isn’t visited by an editor to comment or institute your changes over 7 days, re-post on the talk page indicating that unless there’s objection, you’ll make the changes yourself.
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Step 8: This is a bit blackhat, but folks have great success with it, so it’s worth mentioning. Using the process above and one other time-consuming technique, you can almost ensure you’ll get everything you want. Simply create a second account – on a separate IP as a separate person, unaffiliated with the company. To hide your data, you can either go totally fake (name, bio, et al.) or pose as a friend of yours (make sure they know about it and approve). You can set up a proxy IP to log into on your web server or buy a cheap hosting account (as little as $10 a month) and use that. Build up your sock puppet’s profile a bit, then have them be the “editor” who comes by and makes the change. Just make sure that “sock editor” has made changes to lots of discussed articles, so you don’t stand out.
Why did I post Step 8? Because it’s ridiculous for me to hide information when someone will almost certainly figure it out themselves and/or write about it in the comments. We don’t use this methodology (in fact, we don’t even edit Wikipedia much ourselves, but instead ask contacts). Wikipedia is, in my opinion, not a particularly accurate resource, but an exceptionally prominent one in many SERPs. With generally low relevancy and quality, I admit that I have a hard time feeling guilty about using it to conduct reputation management or even link building, particularly since those additions are often considerable improvement to the existing content.
So, now that I’ve spilled our WIkipedia-editing secrets, I’d love to hear yours – any strategies you employ, tricks you’ve seen, problems you’ve encountered, etc.?
