Why Your Small Business Can’t Market on Wikipedia
As web developers who provide ongoing SEO support for our clients, we are constantly thinking about and helping our clients with reputation management and search engine optimization. When someone types your name or your company’s name into google, you want to own as many of the results as possible. Your website, blog, facebook page, twitter page, linkedin page, Yelp listings, and other business profile pages should rank highly. We want the pages that we can control at the top, because the more search results you can control, the less likely and angry blog or questionable news article will show up on page one.
Wikipedia has become one of the most popular online reference sources, and many small business owners wonder if they can get a wiki-article for their business. After all, Coca Cola has one, Forbes Magazine, even smaller businesses like Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles have their own pages.
Unlike other tools that can help build a business’ online reputation, Wikipedia isn’t a directory. For a business to qualify for a Wikipedia page, they must have already gained significant notability for achievements or accomplishments.
All organizations, whether they are for-profit or non-profit, whether they are a company or a club, have the same notability criteria for inclusion on Wikipedia. The requirements are described here: Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies)
In the Wikipedia world, “notability” isn’t related to the importance of the organization’s work; rather, notability is defined as significant coverage in multiple, independent, secondary sources.
This information isn’t well-known, and it’s important for you as a business owner or employee to do your research before hiring an SEO service and make sure you hire someone who knows what they’re doing.
You want to avoid SEO services that say they will use Wikipedia to improve your search engine rankings. Yes, Wikipedia can be used to help improve your SEO, along with several other things. Wikipedia should not be a primary medium for SEO. And the SEO service should be able to tell you this, and they should be able to tell you any restrictions they may run into and steps they need to take to ensure you never get blacklisted. Let’s put it this way - when they talk about using Wikipedia for SEO purposes, they should speak with caution in their voice.
I read about an incident in an online forum where an SEO service spammed their client’s web link all over wikipedia, using multiple accounts to evade blocks, and when the site was finally blacklisted, they created multiple redirect domains to evade the blacklist.
As a result of the company’s failure to perform due diligence in selecting their SEO service, that company’s site is now blacklisted from ever being included in Wikipedia, likely forever. Google pays attention to Wikipedia’s blacklist and reduces the pagerank of sites listed there. Once a site is blacklisted it NEVER gets removed at the request of someone with a conflict of interest. Delisting requests are considered only from trusted editors.
Hire an SEO service at your peril, and check out how they do their job first.
Now, if it happens that you are notable enough to create a wikipedia article and have it approved, here are some helpful tips from an unidentified Wikipedia administrator who has deleted “countless company articles (either because the company is not notable, or the article is unambiguously promotional, or both), as well as blocked countless accounts who created these articles.”
1. Create a username that belongs only to you, not to the company. It’s OK if you create a username associated with the company (like “Jane Smith at Acme Corp”) as long as the name represents only you. Usernames that represent organizations or roles (like “webmaster” or “VPmarketing” or what not) are blocked on sight as violating Wikipedia’s username policy.
2. Be up front. Disclose your conflict of interest publicly, on your user page (but DO NOT promote your company on your user page or anywhere else). If you don’t, it’s likely to be discovered anyway. Also, if you fail to disclose your COI and your account gets blocked, the resulting loss of the Wikipedia community’s trust from your failure to disclose your COI will just make it harder to get unblocked.
3. Be sure your company has significant coverage in multiple, reliable sources independent of your company. No press releases, no blogs, no self-published articles written by company employees. Independent, reliable sources should have significant coverage, not trivial mentions. If you can’t meet this threshold, don’t even bother writing the article, it will be deleted.
4. Use Wikipedia’s “Articles for creation” procedure, rather than simply create the article yourself in main article space. Again, be sure the article has adequate references and is not promotional in tone.
5. If your company already has an article, propose major changes on the article talk page rather than making the changes yourself. It’s OK to make minor corrections and updates.
6. Finally, familiarize yourself with Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines. I alluded to a few above: username policy, conflict of interest guideline, corporate notability guideline.
Pay attention to those things and you should do fine.