Comments on: Forget linkbait, just copy Wikipedia

By: WebsiteTranslation

WebsiteTranslation — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 23:23:54 +0000

As MaxMotor points out, this is a great idea for non-English sites, because Wikipedia is very often quite bad in other languages – simply use the English Wikipedia text, translate it and you will beat them hands off…

By: Registry Clean

Registry Clean — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 04:32:12 +0000

Hey, thank you a lot for making this. Google has you at number 1 and I must admit I’m extremely impressed by this website.

By: Michael Moore

Michael Moore — Tue, 25 May 2010 13:42:45 +0000

This is one of the worst things you could possibly do. It will also effect your PR. Avoid this method at all costs.

By: Karsten@Best Registry Cleaner

Karsten@Best Registry Cleaner — Mon, 24 May 2010 11:02:32 +0000

LOL great idea – I am going to start writing – ask me in say 1000 years how that went…

seriously providing good content should be the goal but there is already a lot of good content out there – sadly enough the top 10 pages will soon only be dominated by big companies..

By: Red

Red — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:32:07 +0000

Copying wikipedia would take years!!!

By: Davey

Davey — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:02:20 +0000

Aidan,

This is for sure a common issue as I have always had the best success with blogs and other CMS setups.

By: Irish fella

Irish fella — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:03:23 +0000

Hi there Patrick – good Irish name there – thanks for this excellent suggestion. Someone made the point above that you’d need to be a good writer and that this might be very time consuming. I’d have to agree with those sentiments but it does strike me as a very sensible long term strategy.

If google loves the information givers then this certainly is going to be a good technique. Although I’m not sure about being able to get more links than the wiki pages though. People just trust wiki and it gets links without trying because people know about it. That just isn’t going to happen for joe bloggs….

By: Patrick Altoft

Patrick Altoft — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 07:44:59 +0000

Aidan this is a common issue. I have better success with blogs and sites that have a CMS.

By: Aidan Rogers

Aidan Rogers — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:21:53 +0000

Some of the comments are quite amusing.

This was a another excellent post Patrick, it must get on your nerves when you share a great piece of info, to have some morons leave smart ass comments.

I have a question for you. Any tips on encouraging/persuading people to update the links on their sites?

Often I find people are willing to link out, but don’t actually update the site themselves. They pay a designer (by the hour) to do so.

Which means missing out on some juicy links.

I would be happy to it (update the link) for free, but how many people would trust a complete stranger with their ftp details? (pretty much zero)

Do you have any suggestions?

By: alexc

alexc — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:20:16 +0000

Wikipedia has got more backlinks then this: http://www.majesticseo.com/search.php?q=wikipedia.org – 670,224,111 external backlinks from 1.3 mln external domains, and this is before we do major index update next month…

I am not sure the suggested strategy will work however for 2 big reasons:
1) you will be competing with Wikipedia articles that you know have very good backliks, including internal from other pages that are heavily backlinked – it is very hard to compete with those topical backlinks
2) if you just take Wikipedia content you are opening yourself for dup content penalty – if search engines detect that your page is similar to existing authority pages then your dup page has no chance really.

18 months might pass and you may find that trying to outrank established Wikipedia articles is pretty difficult…