>For the last two days, Afghanistan has been exploding in demonstrations over Farkhunda, a Kabul woman who was >beaten to death and torched by a mob. Even though every major news source has done a piece on her, I can't find an >article for her yet in Wikipedia. When it does get written, and finally starts showing up in the search engines, what will >it say? "Farkhunda", the logical search term? Or more likely, the more common format: "the >murder/lynching/battering/victimization/humiliation of [insert woman's name here]".

[...]

>For quite some time, the article for Ozgecan Aslan was hidden from Google searches as well, because due to the >English Wikipedia's unique naming conventions, the article was called "Murder of Özgecan Aslan".

This is a Google problem, not a Wikipedia problem. And my answer, from personal experience, is basically what you began with: Give it time.

In late January I began researching (well, actually, reviewing research I had already done) and writing [[Death of Elisa Lam]], the idea being to get a hook from the article in DYK on February 19, the two-year anniversary of the day her body was found (The people at DYK were, despite the best efforts of myself and another editor there, unable to to do so, so a different hook ran two days later and did a respectable amount of page views). Even at that time, with the article having been in existence for almost a month, it still was on the middle of the second page of Google results. But now it comes up as the first result for “Elisa Lam.”

Some tips for gaming PageRank when you create articles like this:

Make sure there’s a redirect from the subject’s name to the “death/murder of ...” article.
Make sure you have a few internal links from other articles. Lists are good for this: every article about a notable missing-persons case can have an entry in, and link to, [[List of people who disappeared mysteriously]].

Daniel Case