Dave Donohue: nerd-in-residence

I should preface this by stating that search engines and search engine optimization are a complete mystery to me, and always have been. In my mind, the methods that the SEO community uses to raise its customers’ rankings involve a trip to Hogwarts and a magic wand. They certainly earn their paychecks.

Tonight I saw a very interesting post from Lisa Barone – and apparently a lot of other people did too, as its highly placed at Techmeme and thus being discussed by many people as I type this. She believes that Google indexes new Wikipedia articles much faster than it does the Web at large, and also expresses some of the same frustrations with Wikipedia that the PR community does. Specifically, that a non-expert community weilds so much influence over content – in our case, a client or a company – that features at the top of Google’s rankings.

As I said, in my mind Google’s search algorithms are a combination of Greek, calculus, and black magic. While I certainly am not suggesting, as Lisa does, that anything “fishy” is going on between Google and Wikipedia, if new articles are being indexed as fast as she says then Wikipedia just became even more influential than it is already.

And that means that we, as a PR community, need to find a way to work with the Wikipedia community through the discussion page function. Wikipedia isn’t getting any smaller, and Google’s not getting any less useful. Anyone have any particularly useful examples of influencing Wikipedia content without editing an article itself?

update:  [via Steve Rubel] The Google-Wikipedia correlation/relationship seems to be tightening up.  Apparently 50% of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google (I am not sure why this surprises me.  Doesn’t most sites’ traffic come via one search engine or the other?  But still, a high number).