[WikiEN-l] Lies, damned lies, and statistics

[David Gerard]

2009/4/19 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:

> I think you were better off characterizing it as "inadvertent", though
> "inadvertent" only on the part of Google.  Wales is no stranger to SEO, many
> of the early Wikipedians engaged in intentional google-bombing during the
> early years, and the strong suggestion at Wikipedia:Copyrights to provide a
> link back was quite intentionally meant to boost pagerank (and rank in other
> search engines).  Furthermore in my opinion, Google far overvalues internal
> links (and did so even more during the exponential growth phase of
> Wikipedia), which is another factor which caused, and, to a much lesser
> extent continues to cause, Wikipedia to be so highly ranked.  I think Google
> would be a better company, and make more money, if they could fix these
> problems, but 1) they're difficult problems to fix without introducing other
> problems; and 2) it's unlikely to significantly effect Wikipedia anyway -
> the cat's already out of the bag there.


Whuh? Wikipedia's Google ranking was ridiculously bad through
2004-2005. A search on a piece of text from Wikipedia would typically
list three pages of mirror sites before it listed Wikipedia itself.
It's dubious that Jimbo really caused such fantastic SEO, or that he
could effectively apply it so late.

I know some Wikipedians were asking Google "wtf? Could you at least
not rank us three pages behind our own mirrors?"

But the thing is: huge popularity for the wikipedia.org website isn't
necessarily a win for Wikipedia and writing an encyclopedia. Mostly
it's been an expensive pain in the arse.


- d.