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.
Related reading
14 essential WordPress plugins to improve SEO
SEO is often a long and convoluted process which takes time, dedication and expertise. Therefore, anything that can simplify or speed up aspects of a campaign are welcome additions. If your website is hosted on a WordPress CMS, then you are fortunate enough to have access to a plethora of handy plugins. Here are the 14 plugins we think are must-haves for SEO.
ICO marketing in 2018: from SEO to PPC
In an increasingly competitive and regulated world, how to market an ICO will be the difference between success and failure.
The state of HTTPS in 2018: Why should you migrate?
People rarely take SEO recommendations seriously, especially when there are no direct repercussions of not following them. So, when in 2014 Google recommended that all websites should migrate to HTTPS, few website owners took it as a direct instruction. Fast-forward to 2018, however, and things are looking very different. So what is the state of HTTPS in 2018, and why should you migrate?
An SEO’s survival guide to Single Page Applications (SPAs)
If you haven’t heard of Single Page Applications (SPA for short), or if you have been resistant to learning about these JavaScript methods for creating websites, the time for hiding your head in the sand is over.
