[WikiEN-l] SEOs on doing stupid Wikipedia tricks (for the bored)

[Oskar Sigvardsson]

On 8/19/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does that even work? Surely Google isn't stupid enough to give
> internal links a significant weight? Wikipedia ranks highly because
> whenever someone mentions a new topic they almost always give a link
> to the appropriate Wikipedia page for people to find out more about
> it. I very much doubt internal links have much to do with it.

I wondered this too, so I did a little unscientific experiment: click
Random Article till you find an article with a positive PageRank and
put it into google and see what links to it. If it's only wikipedia
pages, then yes, internal links do matter.

After a few articles, I found [[Tonga Plate]] (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga_Plate ) with a PageRank of 4 (not
good, but not terribly bad either) and put it into google to see what
linked to it:
 http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FTonga_Plate&btnG=Search

Three pages, all wikipedia pages (with PageRanks 5, 6 and 6). I'm by
no means an expert on google algorithms, but the fact that [[Tonga
Plate]] got a PageRank of 4 using just three links tells me that the
weight of the ranking is probably the same whether or not the links
are internal or external. Just my guess.

--Oskar