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Wikipedia is 20

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Re: Wikipedia is 20

#331

Post by ghaff »

aerosmile wrote: post #320
mola wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean they tried to make a useful site. During that period search engines were new, and people didn't yet start search result optimization hacking. Which meant ranking was still a good proxy for site quality and not for optimization hacking. The conscious choice to leave the money on the table is exactly the same. Instead of optimizing for cash value which is just a proxy for real value, wikipedia optimized for qu…

I hate to disagree, but SEO as an industry was booming pretty early on. I remember going to a conference in 2001 that was massively popular. The type of stuff you'd learn there was pretty outrageous and very very black hat (so much so, that people sharing those tips were too self-conscious to reveal their identities, hence the term black hat). My point is - you could very much do very well back in those days regardle…

I agree. You go back 10 years and SEO was pretty much synonymous with black hat SEO.

These days, there still are a fair number of mostly low quality content farms. But there's also high quality content marketing. The latter still definitely is aware of things like page views, how far people read through an article, what type of headlines seem to be most effective, and so forth. It starts with good content that readers are interested in though.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#332

Post by leetcrew »

progre wrote: post #330
leetcrew wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not awful, it's just not very high quality content. the instructions are more or less correct, but she does a lot of triggering things in the video, like not measuring the whiskey at all. if I ordered a mint julep in a bar and the bartender made it the way she does, I would not order one at that bar again. if it was expensive, I might ask for my money back or a simpler drink. compare with this video on the same…

Yeah, I'm not saying it's amazing content, I just fail to see how this is "gaming SEO"

you might accuse them of clickbaiting by using an attractive woman instead of someone who knows how to make a proper drink, but yeah I don't really see this as "gaming SEO" per se.

edit: I have now spent entirely too much time researching these videos and I feel bad for criticizing her. apparently she was an actual bartender but had to make a hundred of these videos in two days without any of the proper tools or even a script. https://punchdrink.com/articles/where-is-she-now-janee-mahal...

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#333

Post by progre »

leetcrew wrote: post #332
progre wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm not saying it's amazing content, I just fail to see how this is "gaming SEO"

you might accuse them of clickbaiting by using an attractive woman instead of someone who knows how to make a proper drink, but yeah I don't really see this as "gaming SEO" per se. edit: I have now spent entirely too much time researching these videos and I feel bad for criticizing her. apparently she was an actual bartender but had to make a hundred of these videos in two days without any of the proper tools or even…

Went back an read the comments on that video. Youtube comments are gold sometimes.

Edit: Watched a few more. I get the impression that theese videos are actually made as gags. She says various measurements for the alcohol (like 2 ounces) but consistently just tops up the whole pint glass.

Edit 2: I may need to reevaluate the "not SEO gaming" stance.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#334

Post by jl6 »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #63

Three aphorisms in honor of Wikipedia, greatest encyclopedia in world history, and its 20 years of free knowledge uncorrupted by advertising: * Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory. * Wikipedia is the worst source of information, except for all the others. * Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel a little bit optimistic about human nature.

> Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory.

There could be a useful transferable lesson here. Any endeavour which has a really big risk attached to it (here, the risk of vandalism) can still be a success if you deploy sufficient mitigations, countermeasures and vigilance against that risk.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#335

Post by Anthony-G »

creato wrote: post #72
aerosmile wrote: post #40

I am surprised that the comments haven't mentioned the role of SEO in Wikipedia's growth and defensibility. Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter. But that was just…

It is somehow sad that "caring about content quality" is considered SEO and not just making a good website. I think more than half the things you mentioned are only good SEO because search engines want to send people to websites they will like reading. I think when that is the case, we should be crediting people for making good websites, not good SEO.

Back in the early to mid 2000s, I learned web design/development by volunteering to create websites for charities/NGOs. In the process, I

* ensured that the code (HTML and CSS, only basic non-AJAX, JavaScript) was standards-compliant (at the time, XHTML [1] was “the big thing”)

* implemented basic usability guidelines as advocated by Jakob Nielsen [2] in his Alertbox newsletter and

* followed Mark Pilgrim’s suggestions in his Dive Into Accessibility

Carrying out the above and simply focussing on quality content was enough to rank highly in Google’s search engine results and I never had the need nor inclination to do any research into SEO. Back then the mantra in the web development books was that “content is king” – and Google reflected this philosophy. Sadly, the Web has changed a lot in the intervening years.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_consu...

3. https://web.archive.org/web/20110927131211/http://diveintoac...

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#336

Post by bluecloud1 »

I was one of the first administrators on one of the non-English versions and saw it grow from "this cannot possibly compete with Encyclopedia Britannica etc." to "OMG, what would the world do without Wikipedia?".

I continue to be blown away by Wikipedia, and the fact that it not only works but continually gets better over time. Hats off to Wikipedia management and the fact they have stayed true to their mission.

Please remember to continue to support them, through donations or any other means that you can!

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#337

Post by ghaff »

wodenokoto wrote: post #209
acidburnNSA wrote: post #94

In grad school back in like 2007 I took a 2-credit class called "The History of Nuclear Enterprise" taught by one of those long white-haired Doc Brown type professors. The final project was for each of us to make Wikipedia pages describing some important topic that wasn't covered yet. I made one on the university's nuclear reactor which had just been shut down. I dug through many linear feet of archived info, scannin…

How do you handle the notability requirement? Or are your topics too obscure for anyone to care?

In my experience, notability probably isn't likely to be a big issue for an obscure topic that is well-referenced. (Although it's always a possibility given some of the Wikipedians out there.)

It's generally more of a problem with people. In part this is because notability is so context-dependent. Every professor at a college or professional football player or senior executive at a large company is notable at some level. Most restaurants have been reviewed once or twice somewhere. But the amount of publicly available information about many of these things is probably fairly limited, especially from third parties.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#338

Post by in3d »

froh wrote: post #307
in3d wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one version. Another version, that I know will go over very well here, is that some have invested a lot of money to bring high quality, accessibly-written off-line content by experts in the field to the Web, only for Wikipedia editors to poorly rewrite it in thousands of articles and rank over the original content in Google. And then Wikipedia started using non-follow links so the original sites got no benefit…

What does "non-follow links" mean?

https://www.semrush.com/blog/linkbuilding-dofollow-vs-nofoll...

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#339

Post by leetcrew »

progre wrote: post #333
leetcrew wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you might accuse them of clickbaiting by using an attractive woman instead of someone who knows how to make a proper drink, but yeah I don't really see this as "gaming SEO" per se. edit: I have now spent entirely too much time researching these videos and I feel bad for criticizing her. apparently she was an actual bartender but had to make a hundred of these videos in two days without any of the proper tools or even…

Went back an read the comments on that video. Youtube comments are gold sometimes. Edit: Watched a few more. I get the impression that theese videos are actually made as gags. She says various measurements for the alcohol (like 2 ounces) but consistently just tops up the whole pint glass. Edit 2: I may need to reevaluate the "not SEO gaming" stance.

I also went back to watch some more and I really hope you're right about them being gags. the old fashioned video is more like a "how not to" guide: gross cherries, muddling a whole orange slice with peel (wtf), spilling the drink everywhere in a needless mixing step, etc.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#340

Post by in3d »

aikinai wrote: post #162
in3d wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one version. Another version, that I know will go over very well here, is that some have invested a lot of money to bring high quality, accessibly-written off-line content by experts in the field to the Web, only for Wikipedia editors to poorly rewrite it in thousands of articles and rank over the original content in Google. And then Wikipedia started using non-follow links so the original sites got no benefit…

> high quality, accessibly-written off-line content by experts in the field to the Web Where is this content? It sounds like you’re alluding to something obvious but I honestly have no idea, and would like to know where to find it if it does exist.

Well, that kind of shows the issue, right? I’m talking about what happened many years ago (nofollow links were added in 2005) - companies learned their lesson and wouldn’t try to pay expert writers and editors for reference-type content for web use anymore. Here is content that’s somewhat similar: encyclopedia.com.

By the way, I think Google and its easily-gamed algorithms that rewarded regurgitated content and mega-sites is more to “blame” here than Wikipedia itself for how it went down.

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