This week, Rand's got some insight for you into a down-and-dirty, nasty little trick Mert Sahinoglu clued us into. I can see you all drooling right now...wipe it up. Okay, okay. What if we told you there was a way to bump just about any competitor from the top two positions on Google? Bollocks, you say? It's true, my dear readers, all you have to do is game Wikipedia through a little process we like to call Wiki-Jacking...
FYI - Of note this week is a major instance of social media poisoning at Reddit - Someone is trying to tarnish the name of xkcd.com artist.
Interesting…
But next week can we talk about "wiki poisoning" and how to get the stupid wiki pages OUT of the term you are trying to rank for?!
On second thought: why doesn't Google just make a special entry at the top of the search results for Wikipedia (like local search results) and take them out of the organic listings completely?
This is a good idea: Wiki should be like the paid listings in my opinion.
Wikipedia results should work like Universal search results for videos.
Excellent idea for having the special wiki result!
Interesting article, Rand, especially the comments about internal anchor text.
One problem I can see - what to do you do if Wikipedia is the 'enemy' site ;)
Paniiiiiiiiiic.
setup your own wiki on the subject
then you'll earn wikipedia links, if it's a good wiki.
Hi Rand, other than a misspell of my last name, (written Sahinoglu), I am honored being mentioned by you in a video. Well, now everyone knows my little secret. Mr. Cutts, time to really do something about wikipedia dominance. I donot know how much more proof is needed.
Nice publicity Mert. Congrats.
It certainly is not a cool thing to do but it might be fun. ;-)
This is definitely a commercially viable tactic, but not for SEO. Imagine the value for PPC marketers though.
If you aren't ranked at all for the target kw and you are spending a fortune on PPC ads it would clearly be to your advantage to replace the #1 and #2 spots with Wikipaedia (a non-commercial site). This would yield more clicks for the commercialy angled PPC ads on a SERPs page.
That is a fantastic point. Very smart thinking, sparrowhawk.
Excellent point sparrowhawk.
The only downside is that I cannot find a search term that wiki isn't #1 for.
Wikipedia ranks number eight for buy viagra
Amazingly, today is the first time I've ever seen any no spam pages in the buy viagra serps. Usually it's filled with .edu pages.
don't you mean wikipædia?
I love the editing work on this one, particularly at the very end and also when you spliced in Matt - nice work, Scott :)
Yeah, splicing in the "dick thing to do" quote was absolutely hilarious, Scott, good stuff.
On a more serious note, as you mentioned, Rand, I'm not sure how useful this tactic really is. You really don't want to give Wikipedia any more advantages than it already enjoys, or else your own site will stand little chance of ever ranking #1.
But your point about the value of internal anchor text is very well-taken.
[Coincidentally, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about Wikipedia's homepage this morning if people's anti-Wiki juices are flowing after watching this and could use another outlet :) ]
I totally agree that cross linking anchor text is a very important thing to do, and something that depends only on the webmaster. And is very often ignored or dismissed as unimportant.
Great video. Not sure about the "black hatness", but sure was fun to watch and learn. Congrats.
Hilarious edit in there... I'd say its a malicious technique and would probably call it black hat.
With that being said, I think you should have used that song from Office Space - "Damn it feels good to be a gangsta".
Riiiight... so if I could just get you to move your site a little further back in the rankings tha'd be great... how 'bout those TPS reports :)
Haha, I actually cosndiered using that song, but I couldn't pass up "Jump" if only because it says, "wiggidawiggidawiggity whack!" Which, as you probably guessed, inspired the title of this video.
I hope this doesn't happen a lot - we don't need more wikipedia pages (especially ones that don't already rank) at #1....
Interesting idea though - thanks for the heads-up, Rand.
Oh, and nice tune. Blast from the past.
Its nice to know a few other people who can actually remember this song. It is quite symbolic: 2 kids who have no idea what they are doing manage to create a massive hit and knock off all competitors and get to the top of the charts.
This is only the beginning of Wikipedia manipulation.
that really sounds like a dick thing to do to me. and i agree with most here that i wouldn't want to see more top ranking for wiki, they have plenty already.
but i did like the part at the end where you showed us how to use it as a lesson for white hat about gaining internal link juice with cross linking. i've been woking on doing that for a lot of our clients this week.
This is purely a malicious tactic to annoy someone as opposed to making tonnes of money. I like the phrase wiki jacking its very 1990's gangsta rapper meets evil SEO.....
like bid-jacking on PPC?
Watching that made me put my jeans on back to front
I agree completely. Nice takeaways, since aside from being, as Matt so eloquently put it, "a D*(k thing to do," it's really not going to help your own rankings any. Particularly on the trusted domain thing.
Interesting tactic! Google does love Wiki, and it appears that that love is growing everyday..
any bets on Google buying wiki?
Who knows! You can never tell with Google... They want to be the information portal for everything and everyone. Wiki would help with that...
Nope, no bets over here.
Wikipedia isn't commercial and the founder wouldn't sell out. If Google wanted to buy it, they would want to put ads on it, but the founder is against that.
I don't forsee Google buying Wikipedia -- ever.
I'm an SEO noob but I have manged to get my new site in the top 5 of google organic results for my best keywords. I am learning learning learning all the ways to increase my ranking so I watched the video with great interest. All my efforts have been traditional and 100% white hat. I was curious about the content of the Wiki for my industry and when I got there, I found something that I thought was REALLY disturbing. One of my competitors is doing this:
1. they have an active forum on their site
2. they have created a blog that uses some kind of posting bot that writes the content of a new thread to that blog
3. the blog post contains the content of the original post in the thread, not the rest of the thread WITH the wiki code that links it in to Wikipedia and a link back to the site
4. the blog contains about 50 pages of the same darn keyword combo down the right side bar
5. the rest of the blog is all the same -- the robot posts and keywords.
Personally, I would be utterly embarrassed to get caught doing something like this. Do you all see this as a legitimate use of Wikipedia or is it a clever but underhanded way to get incoming links?
But wouldn't creating a wikipedia article for your own domain be a benefit?
If I am domain XYZ.com and rank first for "xyz" but then after that it is all junk wouldn't creating a Wikipedia article increase my exposure by giving me two links on the first page of the SERPs? (the ideal positioning would obviously be xyz.com first and then en.wikipedia.org/wiki/xyz)
I would rather have people looking for my product to go to a wikipedia page and learn more about me then go on to another site.
Another great Whiteboard Friday. Great explaination. If I buy in totally then now I should build new informational sites. How many different unique aleas do I want to cover?
Thanks Rand, I was just starting to have a little free time ;)
This brings back memories, the 1st decent wiki article we wrote
for a client, we did this, created links from other relevant wiki pages
into the new page...and boy...did we get abuse from the wiki
moderators, they called it a breadcrumb trail and deleted every single
link along with many warnings about our behaviour.
Good way to keep out new wiki contributors!
Ooo.... I just realized that if you wanted to, you could do a bit of social media poisoning at Wikipedia to help prevent the potential page from being built (or at least, temporarily stunt its growth).
In answer to some of the questions above - don't forget that you'll need to have a relatively well respected Wikipedia account and build a fantastic, totally non-commercial, follow-the-guidelines, high quality page there, then promote it internally with accurate, appropriate internal links. You have to pretend that you're a "quality" Wiki-editor.
So, here's the best idea: DO A BUNCH OF BLACKHAT SEO TO GET YOUR COMPETITOR BANNED LOL. Essentially do SEO FOR YOUR COMPETITOR, but make sure you get him banned. lol. Who's the seo champ!!!! who!
I tried adding myself to wikki,but got deleted the same day.
which is kind wrong. I am a photographer,not just some joe off the street. Some of the people they have there are nobody but they are there
Did you just add on to the "buzzword" list? Isn't anything with "jacking" in it mischevious?
Very interesting post and choice of music....
...I knew wearing my shirt on backwards for the past 15 years would eventually come back in style!!
Great idea about a wiki result box...
See you all in SJ!
For you domainers out there wikijacking.com is available. I'll bet it's gone today though.
well nothing is here yet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_jacking
I don't have a lot of experience with editing wikipedia, but couldn't this be used in reverse as well? If you felt so inclined to "disappear" a couple links, just enough to sink them to #2?
Not saying it's ethical, but potentially possible?
Likely result if Wikipedia starts ranking #1 for everything... Google buys them and has a new "Wiki" results tab.
Oh man. I better keep this one under my hat or my boss would have WAY too much fun with it. What a fascinating tactic and I think that Xim is a genius for suggesting that wikipedia have its own separate results on google. Maybe that would be a smart move for an up and coming engine ie, Powerset.
~off topic~
Loving the fact that Rand used the Optimus Prime blaster as his pointer.
Rand, Mert! Thanks for a very entertaining yet informative piece..
Mike
I tried this. You just get edited out like 10 minutes later. It doesn't work.
Wiki is evil. The hack it evil. I feel evil for thinking about using it. ..insert evil smiley face here..