On 20 March 2012 17:20, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: I believe Google take articles directly from the newpages feed. As to why they're the first hit, I suspect it's more to do with the way that our new articles tend to be on highly specific topics, and are very often the only page on the internet *specifically* about that thing... (The SEO people are correct that Wikipedia has a high Google ranking, and correct that this is something of an odd skew on Google's part. What always amuses me is the recurrent belief that Wikipedia deliberately tries to do this, that we're bribing Google or setting up carefully-constructed semantic traps in our articles or something - the fact that it's not a cunning ploy on our part is completely inconceivable to someone who approaches everything from this perspective.) -- - Andrew Gray   andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 20 March 2012 18:39, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote: You just don't understand how vitally important to the Web it really is that the first party (us) ignore the second party (the readers) so that a third party (SEO spammers^Wspecialists) can get in good with a fourth party (Google). [citation needed] - d.

Fred Bauder wrote: We can't? It happens every single day on Wikimedia wikis and the articles generally sit around for weeks, if not months or years. I'm not sure what you're talking about. MZMcBride