User talk:Prioryman/Use of SEO techniques on Wikipedia

Comments

Interesting study and analysis. LadyofShalott 18:19, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

As of 18:49, 16 August 2011 (UTC) Whorlton Castle appears to be ranked #5 on Google results and #1 on Bing and Yahoo. I don't know enough to suggest why this might be, though I do note that the page view statistics tool indicates all but 282 of the to-date ~10k page views took place on August 15, when the DYK was displayed. Would this be responsible for pushing up the page rank? Or has Google's marketing / localization / homing skewed my own personal search results? ☯.ZenSwashbuckler.☠ 18:49, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Googling from the UK, entering whorlton castle as the search term, it shows up in tenth place for me, as Prioryman says. (The same is true when entering "whorlton castle" as the search term.) Cheers, --JN466 19:08, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

OK, it makes sense that the WP page would be higher-ranked in Massachusetts (and much of the rest of the U.S.?) than in the UK. Still shows up #5 for me after clearing cookies and browser cache, so it must be location-specific rather than tailored to previous searches. Thanks for helping clear that up. And please disregard my previous edit summary. ☯.ZenSwashbuckler.☠ 19:17, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm using Google UK; other regional Googles may produce different results. I'm aware of Google's use of customisation to refine search results for individual users based on your previous searches and have tried to allow for this by performing searches from multiple networks, without logging in to Google accounts of anything like that. The results have been identical in all cases. In any case, though, it isn't the absolute ranking that is important here but changes in the rank. My experiment suggested that nothing I did to the article in terms of adding links, templates etc caused any movement. Prioryman (talk) 19:13, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Additional data

Interesting study indeed. Thanks for performing this experiment. Here's a few data that may help tracking this article's further rise in Google:

• Presently, Google indicates the article page has 29 external links from .edu, .co.uk, .com, .co.uk, .co.au, .net and .org sites (excluding Wikipedia itself), or 53 external links with the "very similar" results included.
• Presently, Google indicates the article has 55 internal links from other Wikipedia pages.

Interestingly, the 29 external links Google thinks exist include this page, which (as far as I can see – am I missing anything?) does not link to Whorlton Castle at all, but only includes a link to Blickling Hall. (The reason seems to be that Whorlton Castle was mentioned in a question on that site that was present in the left hand sidebar of pages that linked to Wikipedia: [1]) Cheers, --JN466 19:03, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Don't forget that quite a few websites scrape content from Wikipedia for their own purposes. I'm sure that accounts for most if not all of the external links. It is unclear whether this has any effect on ranking; I suspect not, otherwise we would see Wikipedia knockoff pages being given a far higher rank than they seem to do. Regarding internal links, many were added by myself through the addition of a template and a few through direct editing. As documented in the study, this linking had no observable effect on page ranking. Prioryman (talk) 19:19, 16 August 2011 (UTC)