How To Overthrow A Wikipedia Result

A busy ranking artist runs into this problem quite often. I ran into it again the other day and figured I might as well show my Blue Hat peeps how to overcome the same problem since its a fairly popular problem to have and there is a simple solution to it.

The Problem
Your site is holding a particular rank and a Wikipedia page is ranked right above it. The specific ranks don’t particularly matter, but much like Hillary Clinton in the primaries you can’t possibly live being beaten like that. You have to drop the Wikipage down a notch and you have to continue moving up.

The Simple Solution
The simplicity of this tactic actually depends very heavily on the Wikipedia entry. Either way they’re all very beatable, but some are easier than others. In fact as mentioned I just ran into this problem recently and I managed to knock the competitive Wikipage entirely out of the top 20 in just two days using these steps. First you need to understand why the Wikipage ranks. Most of these pages rank for 3 reasons.

1) The domain authority of Wikipedia.org.

2) Innerlinking amongst other Wikipedia entries boosting the page’s value. <- Particularly the *See Also’s

3) Inbound links from most typically blogs and forums. <- An observant person would not only notice the high percentage of links from blogs/forums in contrast to other types of links but a strong lack of sitewide links from any of those sites.

You obviously can’t do anything about the domain authority of Wikipedia.org but understand that it’s pages are like a tripod; If you knock out one of the legs the whole thing falls (pun). Well now that you understand why it’s there right up above you like a towering fugly friend of the girl you’re trying to hit on the solution becomes obvious. Knock out reasons two and three.

Steps
1) Using your favorite link analysis tool (I prefer the simplistic Yahoo Site Explorer) find all the pages that link to the particular wikipedia entry that come from the wikipedia.org domain.

2) Go to each listing and find the reference to the offending Wikipage. You’ll find most of them in the See Also section or linked throughout the article. This is where the simplicity that I was talking about before comes into play. Listings such as “Flash Games” or “Election News” are easier because they’re so irrelevant. When people are searching Google for terms such as these they’re obviously wanting to find actual flash games or election news, not some faggy Wikipedia page saying what they are. The same concept applies to other Wikipages linking to them. Just because the author put the text Cat Food in the article or the See Also doesn’t mean its a relevant reference to the subject matter.

3) SLOWLY remove nearly all those bitches! Be sure to leave a good convincing reason for the removal on the editing reason. Remove as many as possible but strictly limit yourself. I understand Blue Hatters have a tendency to overdo things but you’re just going to fuck yourself if you quickly go through each and every reference and mass delete them. If you don’t know how many you should remove, then keep it to no more than 1-2 a day. Remove the references with the highest pagerank first if you got a ranking emergency and switch IPs between each one. This will either knock out one of it’s legs or at least cripple the leg a bit. Which leaves you with my match and exceed philosophy.

4) Find all the blogs and forums that link to that Wikipage and go drop a link in as many of them as you can. Match and exceed. I’m not going to dive into the nofollow talk on this one or talk about the benefits of links via blog comments. Just realize your goal in this instance isn’t to get more links it’s to get your link on the same pages that link to the Wikipage. As mentioned above you’ll be dealing mostly with blogs and forums, you’re in the same niche as the topics they’re talking about obviously and you probably won’t have any sitewide links to deal with so you won’t have to go through any link begging pains.

5) Try to drop your link into the article. This is common sense.

Side Note
Wikipedia’s domain authority isn’t something Ý0µ should be entirely worried abouṪ. They’re site and µrl structure actually ßÊcomes favorable to help deaden some of the heightening factors.

OH FYI! There is now a Printer Friendly link on every post on Blue Hat by popular demand

Original: How To OverThrow A Wikipedia Result