Google loves Wikipedia. Everyone knows it, and many aren’t that happy about it, especially when some of their poorly written content outranks higher-quality websites on the same subject. But did you know Wikipedia pages appear on Page 1 of Google for 99 percent of searches?
Beyond that staggering number, Wikipedia is the No. 1 result on Google for 56 percent of searches, while 96 percent of searches saw Wikipedia in one of the top five positions. Only eight keywords (Mail, news, trainers, national, sweets, wardrobe, phone, flight) didn’t appear on Page 1.
These numbers all come from a new study by Intelligent Positioning, which based their findings on 1,000 unique one-word searches created by using a random noun generator on Google UK and conducted using Google Chrome on Incognito mode.
Author Sam Silverwood-Cope notes that Wikipedia did “extremely well” for geographic and scientific searches (e.g., Himalayan, bird and paediatrician), but also did surprisingly well for searches of food and clothing (e.g., butter, milk mayonnaise, trousers, underclothes, wallet).
“If there was one place taken up in every search by Wikipedia, then that would mean there is one less place in the Top Ten for possible PPC paying corporations,” Silverwood-Cope wrote. “Just a thought, not a fact.”
Of the eight words that didn’t show up on Page 1, Silverwood-Cope noted that “all these words are obviously highly competitive or incorporate the word within major corporations and services (for example National).”
Wikipedia has millions of pages indexed and is considered an authority website by Google – co-founder Sergey Brin has called Wikipedia “one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet” and “an invaluable resource to anyone who is online” and has generously donated to Wikipedia.
But after seeing these numbers, should Wikipedia be dominating Google’s search results to this extent? Tell us in the comments.
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