30 Links in 30 Days Linkbuilding Campaign - Day 6 - The Wikipedia User Page

Wikipedia and links

Wikipedia is famously a rel="nofollow" site, but it doesn't really matter for several reasons.

Linkwashing Wikipedia-Style

First, as with Twitter, there are other sites which use the open content-licensed Wikipedia database and don't include the nofollow link markup. That means nofollow links are washed by way of other sites into follow links.

Traffic vs. PageRank

What comes first, PageRank or Traffic? The focus on the Chicken (PageRank, aka Google) belies the power of the Egg (namely to produce the chicken). Wikipedia, as a top-ten site, delivers traffic to links on its site. That has an effect on PageRank. With link-building we want both traffic and follow-links with high PageRank. Wikipedia links deliver more of the former than the latter.

URL

In a recent name Googling, the User page for a client came up as one of the top ten SERP results. Powerful. The reason was the enormous weight of Wikipedia, a fairly comprehensive and keyword-saavy User page and the fact that the User name in the URL was the term we Googled. This means the importance of the Username (as, say, a keyword or set of key or brand terms) is not to be underestimated, as was mentioned in the recent blog entry Link-building, domaining and why your domain name needs keywords.

Related posts:

1. 30 Links in 30 Days Linkbuilding Campaign - Day 12 - The Facebook Page
2. 30 Links in 30 Days Linkbuilding Campaign - Day 4 - Twitter
3. 30 Links in 30 Days Linkbuilding Campaign - Day 14 - Docstoc