John Mueller of Google Says Wikipedia Links Offer No SEO Value

[Ryuzaki]

This is a simple comment that goes right in line with what Google says about nofollow links:

On Reddit yesterday, John Mueller (/u/johnmu) said:

"Randomly dropping a link into Wikipedia has no SEO value and will do nothing for your site. All you're doing is creating extra work for the Wikipedia maintainers who will remove your link drops. It's a waste of your time and theirs. Do something that's useful in the long term for your site instead, build something of persistent value."​

​

I bothered to make this thread because I think this statement opens up an interesting conversation about nofollow links.

We know they're gearing up to stop treating nofollow as a rule and to treat it as a hint. This is mainly for crawling and discoverability on the web. They can crawl it and still simply discount its power in the link graph. But what does this say about sites with "high moderation" using nofollow?

Big newspapers and magazine sites that take on contributors mass-converted to all nofollow external links a while ago. I'm certain Google has worked on figuring out which links to count and which not to (probably based on author profiles and the links they post on average). Why couldn't or wouldn't they do this with Wikipedia, the juciest site to ever exist?

That begs the question about Wikipedia and moderation too. Just because it's highly moderated doesn't mean it's good moderation. It's a pretty corrupt platform these days, so I wouldn't blame Google for continuing to discount links from the domain.

He said "no SEO value," so that means page rank, anchor text, authority rank, trust rank, chei rank, and any other rank we can come up with.

There's also the question of whether the Matt Cutts / John Mueller's of the world are allowed to flat out lie. They're obviously vague a lot of the time, but sometimes they're crystal clear about something. Those times are the interesting ones.

What say ye?

 

[CCarter]

Interesting enough this was a follow up:

sauce:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1297849609327382528

There is some hope for SEOs after all.

 

[harrytwatter]

I think names like Cutts, Mueller, Iyles are all just PR men disguised as customer service reps, and the product they sell is this illusion that Google is so far ahead of both spammers and competition that we can't even begin to fathom how finely tuned and intelligent their algos are. Because we can't fathom we must hang on very word they drop and treat it as gospel.

Anyone who searches regularly, like all day every day, can easily see through this highly refined, overly-practiced illusion.

Over half of my searches now require quotes and/or time refinement (last year for example) to get anything of use returned for my queries. Not claiming to represent the average Googler but the amount of garbage on page 1 is maddening. (When I say garbage I don't just mean spam, I also mean shit legacy sites like Forbes that rank well for a myriad of queries they have no right to and to which they provide no real unique journalism, all while inundating you auto-playing ad bukake)

Recently it does look like they've gotten tangled up in some of their self-spun web with the recent congressional hearings:

• https://www.seroundtable.com/us-congress-google-uses-clicks-user-data-in-search-29870.html
• https://twitter.com/x/status/1291815395142205440

It's a tough game I get it. You can't answer definitively yes/no to SEO questions because it will only be a matter of time before your precious algo is deconstructed and reverse-engineered. But at the same time you have to provide a long enough answer to keep up this appearance that Google cares, about users.

So, this hair splitting of "can impact rankings" vs "direct ranking signal" is all kind of boring theater to me and that's fine, it really is delusional to think a corporation, an entity designed for profit, not transparency, "owes" users or SEOs anything...

 

[Ryuzaki]

Over half of my searches now require quotes and/or time refinement (last year for example) to get anything of use returned for my queries.

I did my first batch of real searching in a long time the other day, trying to find an old rap group from back in the day. I spent about an hour trying every combination of words possible, adding in quotes, locations, everything. It was giving me nothing but non-sense and unrelated social justice warrior style articles from the big media sites. Half of the time it didn't even return results about rap music.

I finally remembered an artist they featured locally that isn't that big, and went to youtube and searched "ft. Artist Name" and scrolled down to about the 200th result until I found their video. That's how bad Google failed me.

I'm surprised it's this bad for really long-tail queries. So much for Google Hummingbird understanding intent.

 

[bernard]

I've noticed the decline in quality as well.

Sometimes you just can't find what you're looking for, even after refining your searches several times. I don't recall it being like that, but maybe we've gotten used to a high quality.

 

[secretagentdad]

Its not just google declining in quality.
Its web indexing services in general.
There is just a lot more noise pollution these days.

 

[bernard]

I've found Youtube to be worse as well. My recommendations are almost non-existant now. They used to have a lot of cool new stuff.

 

[harrytwatter]

Yeah I feel like Google's gotten caught up in their own echo chamber. Anything political I search only returns articles that align with popular media consensus. I get they don't want fringe, and this is a similar thing with health where they don't want potentially "dangerous" information ranking as Gary has expressed.

But there are different opinions on topics, from all "political spectrums" and different sides can still use data and science to support their perspectives, but unfortunately if that conflicts with whatever platitude is going viral at the moment, it's real hard to find any information.

YouTube is really bad with this. The shit they're recommending to me is the same type of shit people are paying to promote often times. Whether it's web search or YouTube I feel like I'm always getting high-level, watered down, "McDonald's Light" takes on everything. Gone are real niche experts, truly unique content creators, and those with viewpoints that differentiate with whatever is trending on Buzzfeed today.

 

[bernard]

It's hard to explain, it's not just political stuff, it just seems everything is more milquetoast. Every recommendation you get, be it personal finance or history or travel or whatever, it just doesn't do it, it's like Youtube has turned into Disney or something.

It seems like virality has been turned down in the algo, if you are on that infamous "fringe" scale.

 

[DanielS]

It's hard to explain, it's not just political stuff, it just seems everything is more milquetoast. Every recommendation you get, be it personal finance or history or travel or whatever, it just doesn't do it, it's like Youtube has turned into Disney or something.

It seems like virality has been turned down in the algo, if you are on that infamous "fringe" scale.

Yeah, YouTube has actively encouraged this transformation since the various "scandals" that took place over the past few years that caused advertisers to pull ad dollars. YouTube doesn't want the headache anymore, creators want to be able to monetize their videos with AdSense, and advertisers are willing to bend to whatever side of the political spectrum is the loudest (and we all know which side that is).

It's unfortunate, because what made YouTube the behemoth it is today is the user-generated content that was uploaded. Remember when YouTube's slogan was "Broadcast Yourself"? Notice how that slogan disappeared in 2016?

 

[bernard]

It's little better than mainstream media at this point.

 

[Stones]

I've been on Bitchute for years. Shitty app but it's like the Wild West days of YT. You never know what you are going get. From, "Because Aliens", to quality movies from the 80s, to historical analysis. I'll take the drop in video quality over the endless infotainment vids trying to sell me tech gadgets and CNN/Fox/Thomas Sowell videos. And Mueller's not great with the truth.

 

[Bobish]

Digging up this thread from last year to see if anyone has new insights. I added two Wikipedia links from my site a few months ago - they haven't been removed from Wikipedia and what I've noticed instead is a large number of questionable backlinks that seem to be sites skimming Wikipedia for other languages or countries.

Should I be concerned about these? Is Wikipedia truly no-value for link building like the first post was questioning?

 

[Ryuzaki]

@Bobish, I think you can safely ignore the Wikipedia re-uploaders. Google is undoubtedly ignoring or at least applying a canonical to Wikipedia. I’ve got hundreds of these domains linking to me now with no negative effect.

I’m still in the camp that Wikipedia links help (especially if they’re on there for a length of time that connotes “trust”). It’s a good source of traffic and a way to end up picking up other links too.

 

[harrytwatter]

Picking up other links alone is probably worth building them. For entry-level content authoring everyone knows not to just reference a Wikipedia page, but referencing the references within a Wikipedia page surely is preferable, for both the writer (to produce quality trustworthy content) and the "source" referenced via the footnotes.

At least that's where I got my paper references all through high school and college.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

Picking up other links alone is probably worth building them. For entry-level content authoring everyone knows not to just reference a Wikipedia page, but referencing the references within a Wikipedia page surely is preferable, for both the writer (to produce quality trustworthy content) and the "source" referenced via the footnotes.

At least that's where I got my paper references all through high school and college.

To make your writing more trustworthy, don't cite the references on Wikipedia. Cite the references the references on Wikipedia cited.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, which makes it a tertiary source. Tertiary sources cite secondary sources, which are summaries of original works. If you really want to make an original statement in your niche, you gotta read the original work and cite that.

This is the difference between a piece that tells you the generally accepted SEO principals, and another piece that tells you what Google's latest patents are. The former is OK but the latter is sure much more interesting.