Hi Discovery,
Over the past few years, my anecdotal impression is that search results from Wikipedia have become less and less prominent when I use major web search engines.
I'm aware that Discovery is working on internal search features including cross-project search, and that WMF people working on readership are trying to increase the dwell time and number of pages that Wikipedia visitors spend on Wikipedia. Has anyone analyzed trends for web search engine rankings of Wikipedia articles, particularly over the last few years? Also, is anyone analyzing what would be required to increase the rankings of Wikipedia articles (and information from sister sites, such as Wikisource and Commons) when people use web search engines?
Thanks,
Pine
Search Engine Land has a Sept 2015 article on the topic of reduced ranking of Wikipedia: http://searchengineland.com/study-despite-wikipedias-visibility-decline-in-g...
This is based on a short study by Stone Temple: https://www.stonetemple.com/google-still-loves-wikipedia-more-than-its-own-p...
My thoughts: Some of the traffic to WMF will be replaced by different interaction methods of asking questions, eg: "ok google, what is the capital of france => "The capital of Francis is Paris"; and by direct answers on the SERP, eg: "who is mark twain"[1] returns a direct answer at the top, referencing biography.com, along with an knowledge pane on the right sourced from Wikipedia and likely other mixed sources.
I think having traffic replaced by direct answers is still a good thing as it fits within the mission[2] and vision[3] of WMF of disseminating knowledge. The primary downside I see is the shallowness of the knowledge presented; the quick answer lacks the discovery aspect of going to a full wiki article and becoming lost delving numerous links deep.
--
[1] https://google.com/search?q=who+is+mark+twain [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement [3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision
Thanks, --justin
On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Discovery,
Over the past few years, my anecdotal impression is that search results from Wikipedia have become less and less prominent when I use major web search engines.
I'm aware that Discovery is working on internal search features including cross-project search, and that WMF people working on readership are trying to increase the dwell time and number of pages that Wikipedia visitors spend on Wikipedia. Has anyone analyzed trends for web search engine rankings of Wikipedia articles, particularly over the last few years? Also, is anyone analyzing what would be required to increase the rankings of Wikipedia articles (and information from sister sites, such as Wikisource and Commons) when people use web search engines?
Thanks,
Pine
discovery mailing list discovery@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery
The Discovery team does present some high-level data on referrals from external sources, including search engines. [0] [1]
Select weekly or monthly under "Smoothing" to make it easier to see longer trends.
As Dan said, I'm not aware of anyone within the foundation targeting optimizing search engine presence. I know there are a few smaller initiatives - like adding open graph meta descriptions, lazy loading sections/images on mobile (impacts page loading speed), and moving javascript to the footer a few years back.
There's also an SEO tag in Phabricator, which folks can use to indicate tasks are related to improving bits of code along these lines. [2]
[0] http://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/ [1] http://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/#traffic_by_engine [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/1163/
Yours, Chris Koerner Community Liaison - Discovery Wikimedia Foundation
P.S. Confession time. I use to do web development and SEO stuff was part of the job. I also still know some folks who work in this world. :)
On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 6:49 PM, Justin Ormont justin.ormont@gmail.com wrote:
Search Engine Land has a Sept 2015 article on the topic of reduced ranking of Wikipedia: http://searchengineland.com/study-despite-wikipedias- visibility-decline-in-google-it-still-shows-up-more-often- than-google-properties-231277
This is based on a short study by Stone Temple: https://www.stonetemple.com/google-still-loves-wikipedia- more-than-its-own-properties/
My thoughts: Some of the traffic to WMF will be replaced by different interaction methods of asking questions, eg: "ok google, what is the capital of france => "The capital of Francis is Paris"; and by direct answers on the SERP, eg: "who is mark twain"[1] returns a direct answer at the top, referencing biography.com, along with an knowledge pane on the right sourced from Wikipedia and likely other mixed sources.
I think having traffic replaced by direct answers is still a good thing as it fits within the mission[2] and vision[3] of WMF of disseminating knowledge. The primary downside I see is the shallowness of the knowledge presented; the quick answer lacks the discovery aspect of going to a full wiki article and becoming lost delving numerous links deep.
--
[1] https://google.com/search?q=who+is+mark+twain [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement [3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision
Thanks, --justin
On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Discovery,
Over the past few years, my anecdotal impression is that search results from Wikipedia have become less and less prominent when I use major web search engines.
I'm aware that Discovery is working on internal search features including cross-project search, and that WMF people working on readership are trying to increase the dwell time and number of pages that Wikipedia visitors spend on Wikipedia. Has anyone analyzed trends for web search engine rankings of Wikipedia articles, particularly over the last few years? Also, is anyone analyzing what would be required to increase the rankings of Wikipedia articles (and information from sister sites, such as Wikisource and Commons) when people use web search engines?
Thanks,
Pine
discovery mailing list discovery@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery
discovery mailing list discovery@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery
Thanks for the replies. I wonder if WMF Communications would be interested in SEO and have resources which could be directed to this purpose. WMF Communications seems to be very interested in expanding Wikipedia's social media presence and increasing fundraising revenue, and it seems to me that an extension of that would be to expand readership through SEO. Pinging Melody.
Pine
Hello Pine,
Some of the stuff at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics might be interesting to you. I think the effort is kind of split, there is an Analytics group under Technology department and another Analytics effort under Discovery...?
Svetlana gry, irc://chat.freenode.net/wikimedia
On 17 April 2017 at 22:27, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Over the past few years, my anecdotal impression is that search results from Wikipedia have become less and less prominent when I use major web search engines.
I'm pretty sure there's some research out there that shows this is true, but off the top of my head I don't know where it is.
I'm aware that Discovery is working on internal search features including cross-project search, and that WMF people working on readership are trying to increase the dwell time and number of pages that Wikipedia visitors spend on Wikipedia. Has anyone analyzed trends for web search engine rankings of Wikipedia articles, particularly over the last few years? Also, is anyone analyzing what would be required to increase the rankings of Wikipedia articles (and information from sister sites, such as Wikisource and Commons) when people use web search engines?
What you're describing is called search engine optimisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization.
Oliver looked a Google Webmaster Tools a while back. There's definitely a wealth of information in there, but it was very difficult to make much sense of it. Some of their metrics were the same as ours but they often disagreed by orders of magnitude. We gave up trying to make sense of it.
Discovery doesn't really have anyone with particular expertise in search engine optimisation. I think if we were to do any meaningful work on search engine optimisation, we'd need to hire a person who has experience that can work on it full time. Given this year's mostly flat budget, that sadly seems unlikely.
Thanks, Dan