All About Wikis

You may not have heard of Jimmy Wales, but you've certainly heard of his brainchild - Wikipedia. This website is one of the power houses of "social media" websites - where the community determines the content and polices itself. It operates to this day as a non-profit, taking no advertising dollars and run on a shoe-string budget.

What you may not be familiar with is Wales' other project - Wikia. Wikia is a for profit advertiser sponsored website with over 5 million pageviews per month. It's basically a wiki platform, that allows anyone to make a wiki of their own - for free - and some of the wikis on it are massive.

Have a look at the video interview of Jimmy Wales to learn more about this "side project" and better understand how wikis work.

More Wikipedia Content now Served on Yahoo! SERPs

Wikipedia deep links and images are now being served in Yahoo search as part of an attempt to add more third-party content to its results. Now when a Wikipedia page is served in Yahoo’s search results, four links to sections within the article will be displayed along with an image from the page.

With this new search engine real estate, your company’s Wikipedia page is even more beneficial. Make sure your page has relevant section headers and an enticing picture.

How to OWN a SERP

Recently a client asked me why we are recommending they create a blog, a Wikipedia page, a Google Knol, and a YouTube channel with videos. They couldn't understand what one had to do with the other. We often refer to the combination of these tactics as Reputation Management. And while we find it essential to control as much of the search engine results page (SERP) for a client for messaging reasons, we also like the fact that it just plain allows an opportunity to own as much of the real estate on a SERP as possible.

But since most search engines only allow up to 2 links from a single domain, you must create optimized presence in a variety of domains in order to do that. With strategic website choices (like those I mentioned above) and appropriate tagging and optimization, a client can achieve many slots in a SERP, even for competitive phrases. If done well, a client can potentially own all 10 first page results.

Google Knol Now Open For Contributions

Last December we wrote about Google Knol and now it is open for contributions. The difference between Knol and Wikipedia is that authorship is strongly encourages and every knol will be associated with an author or a group of set authors. Knol also favors multiple knolls on the same subject, allowing people to voice their opinion on a specific topic.

If there is an existing Knol on a topic and someone reading it wants to add or contribute to it, the author of that Knol can accept, reject or modify the suggested edit. A Knol can also include ads from Google Adsense, providing that author with a revenue share.

So far, I find Knol to be really easy to read and there are mostly articles about health related topics. Knol also allows you to include a biography about yourself to show your credibility in the particular subject you wrote about. This may become a great tool for businesses to be authoritative within Google about subjects that pertain to their business.

Check out Google Knol and see how you can contribute.