[Foundation-l] Does google favour WIkipedia?

[Andrew Gray]

On 20 March 2012 17:20, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
>> The answer, evidently, is "not as much as Bing" -
>> http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2161910/Bing-Not-Google-Favors-Wikipedia-More-Often-in-Search-Results-Study
>>
>> Thought people might find it interesting :)
>
> No question that we are a center of attention for Google. I've noticed
> that when I create a new article, it often comes up as the first hit on
> Google for the subject within 5 minutes. There is no way such positioning
> is based on external links to the article.

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 at dunelm.org.uk