Posted by Sam Battin, Senior Natural Search Specialist
For years, Wikipedia has consistently been a top-ranked site for high-volume keywords. The site was designed with SEO in mind, and its contributors have produced hundreds of millions of quality pages that are exhaustively cross-referenced and updated to contain the newest information. Search engines love this site because it satisfies so many informational needs for visitors; thus, search engines tend to give it high visibility for relevant queries. In the best case, a Wikipedia page for your company can be a source of good information and a potential ambassador for your site, as well as a concise definition of your business’s primary focus that can indirectly assist visibility for your brand.
On the other paw, your company’s Wikipedia page can seem like a nightmare if it shows negative information about your brand. The high visibility and reputation of Wikipedia can give pages on this site a good chance of ranking above the fold for searches on your brand name. You can’t blame people for looking, though; the variety of information on the Web helps users make informed buying decisions, and neutral sites like Wikipedia are indispensable to the modern participant.
So what can you do when your Wikipedia page paints a mean picture of your brand? This POV will help you review your options and make a decision on what to do next.
Search Engines Want Reliability
In some cases, you may be able to “push down” a Wikipedia page in the results by improving the link portfolio of information sources that show your brand in a more positive light. If search engines think that other pages are more reliable, authoritative, and useful to visitors than the Wikipedia entry, they will rank these pages above Wikipedia. For example, though AT&T has a Wikipedia page, the search query “AT&T” returns a full set of site links, entries for the “Map Pack” for AT&T stores in the local area, and a variety of different att.com subdomains like “Fan Zone”. This pushes the “Wikipedia” page down to the 10th result or lower, so search engine users will generally see the Wikipedia page only if they are looking for it.