From a technical SEO perspective, it’s no exaggeration to say that Wikipedia has put its name to one of the most successful SEO efforts ever. With more than 46 million article pages in over 300 languages, Wikipedia welcomes billions of visitors every month, each page benefiting from an influx of organic traffic. The quality control scheme, strictly enforced by the site’s founder, the Wikimedia Foundation, has also helped create a strong sense of trust between visitors and Wikipedia.
https://seoreq.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/wikipedia-seo.jpg
So what is Wikipedia’s success really due to? Moreover, what kinds of lessons can people doing SEO take from Wikipedia?
First of all, it can be thought that Wikipedia’s rich, original content contributes to its prominence in Google rankings. After all, the site’s high authority is also undoubtedly important. However, Wikipedia’s appearance at the very top for almost every informational keyword search is also the result of deliberately executed SEO work.
The factors that cause Wikipedia to be listed at the top in both mobile and desktop search rankings can be summarized as follows:
- Domain name selection- Internal links and HTML appearance- Meta descriptions- Page template and URL format- Site architecture- Rapid page loading
Domain name selection
Wikipedia’s goal when setting out was to provide quality, satisfying content to people from all over the world who want to access educational information. To do this, Wikipedia has never shied away from adapting its domain to various countries. In other words, a user living in Italy could visit “Wikipedia.it” instead of “Wikipedia.com” to access Italian information.
Wikipedia, which has multiple domain names such as Wikipedia.in and Wikipedia.fr, also achieved a successful international SEO effort through this approach.
Similarly, for mobile sites, subdomains were created such as “en.m.wikipedia.org” and more than 300 of these.
Another important factor is the way Wikipedia’s universal landing page at wikipedia.org lists the most popular encyclopedias according to article count, provides backlink exits for other languages in each country-specific Wikipedia version, and uses the *rel=”alternate” * tag in those links.
Internal links and HTML appearance
When reading any article on Wikipedia, pay attention to the citations. All backlink exits are listed at the very bottom of the page. This helps Google bots detect the outbound link later when they visit the site.
Also, Wikipedia’s own internal links are likewise listed only after the \u003c/body\u003e tag. In this way, Wikipedia avoids the penalties Google applies to sites that place outbound links in footer and sidebar areas.
Meta descriptions
Hold on tight: there is no meta description on any article page on Wikipedia! Yes, Wikipedia always leaves the meta description section empty—despite the fact that today SEO experts insist it “must definitely be filled in.” The reason is to allow Google to automatically populate the meta description section according to what the user searches for.
To explain with an example, let’s take Wikipedia’s “Sun” article. When a user performs a search like “What kind of star is the Sun?”, Google can display, directly under the Wikipedia title in the search results, the portion from the relevant article. Similarly, in a search query like “How old is the Sun?”, the meta description area can change.
By following Wikipedia’s dynamic, variable meta description structure, users can reach the information they’re looking for faster and more easily. And that’s definitely a sensible move.
Page template and URL format
Wikipedia insists on using a single page template and URL format, so that a common structure is also adopted in its other sibling sites.
For example, Wiki pages have this URL format: https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/[Başlık]
The URL format for other Wikipedia sites is as follows:
Wikimedia Commons: File:Jenna Fischer5crop.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
Viktionary: https://tr.wiktionary.org/wiki/pallet/
Wikiquote: Türkçe atasözleri - Vikisöz
Conclusion
As the world’s largest virtual encyclopedia, Wikipedia is indeed carrying out a very successful SEO effort. The SEO work implemented by site administrators is the kind that will certainly inspire other SEO specialists too.