On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 3:36 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
No, that's not really true, because the wikipedia implicitly (not deliberately) uses SEO techniques; google juice enters and never leaves. Basically almost any article in the wikipedia ranks higher than almost the rest of the web for that reason.
That's treating google as some sort of immovable force -- but pagerank is ultimately, behind whatever soul-crushingly complex set of nested algorithms, a *subjective* measure, tweaked by engineers who evaluate different result sets by looking at them and deciding if they're "good" (or equivalently, by monitoring what web surfers think is "good").
So while SEOs like to think in terms of rules and algorithms, it's much more practical (and satisfying) to forget all that shit and just think in terms of creating useful, compelling content, trusting that "google" will somehow be able to tell that high-quality wikipedia articles aren't tarnished, action-at-a-distance style, by less visited wikipedia articles elsewhere.
See, for example, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/07/64130