4 Reasons Not To Put Your Company in the Wikipedia
A client of mine recently asked me if I thought they should write a Wikipedia article about their company.
It may seem like a good idea to have an article about your company in the largest and most popular online encyclopedia. However, like I told my client, there are a few good reasons why many companies should stay out.
Reasons to stay out of the Wikipedia
- Having an article in the Wikipedia with a link to your web site will not improve your search engine rankings because the Wikipedia uses rel=nofollow on all outbound links.
- It is possible that the Wikipedia article on your company could rank higher than your companies web site in the search engines. This is more true for web sites with a low Page Rank and few inbound links.
- Since anybody can edit articles in the Wikipedia, it is possible for people to put false information on the article about your company. This false information will stay on the page until a Wikipedia editor or you discover it and delete it. If there isn’t an article in the Wikipedia about your company, someone could still create a new article and write bad stuff. This is less likely because it would take more effort on their part.
- Negative things that happen to your company can find their way onto the Wikipedia article about your company. If these things are factual, there will be little that you can do to permanently removed them. Good examples of this would be a restaurant that has a food poisoning incident or a scandal involving the CEO of a company. It could be bad for business if facts like these make their way onto the Wikipedia article about your company.
The best Wikipedia links are reference links
The best links to your web site from the Wikipedia are reference links in articles. They can show that you are an authority on the articles topic.
Reference links can also drive a lot of traffic to your web site. The Wikipedia article on Avatars which references our Marketing through Avatars post brings in more traffic than Avatar related searches do.
A great link for this Internet Marketing Blog would be a reference link on the Wikipedia article about Internet Marketing. Since that article ranks number one in Google for ‘Internet Marketing’, having a reference link on that page could drive a lot of traffic to our site.
Instead of creating an article in the Wikipedia about your company, create content that is worth referencing from Wikipedia articles that are important to your niche.
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