Google Traffic To Wikipedia up 166% Year over Year by Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott gives us some of the data search marketers have been craving for years. We all knew that Wikipedia tends to rule in the Google results but these statistics show us by how much.
- 70% of Wikipedia’s upstream visits came from search engines
- 50% of the search engine visits came from Google
- The percentage of Google’s downstream traffic going to Wikipedia increased by 166% year over year
- Last week Wikipedia was the #3 website in Google’s downstream
This is eye opening data, but I would not consider this shocking, at all.
Postscript: Also see Danny’s Wikipedia Enters Top Ten Most Visited Sites from Friday.
Related Topics: Google: Other | Google: SEO | Search Engines: Wikipedia | Stats: Hitwise
It would be interesting to see if Wikipedia has enough of a “brand” now to hold up on its own if it didn’t so well in the search engines, especially Google. I don’t know if it would, but it really doesn’t have to worry, because for so many searches, Wikipedia does offer the best overview of a topic.
That said, Google gives Wikipedia a lot of credit as a trusted site and gives it high rankings even for Wikipedia pages that are crappy and uninformative. The whole “trusted site” thing is where Google has a weakness—even if a site is trusted, that doesn’t mean that every page it publishes is genius.
Correction on the second bullet point:
70% of Wikipedia’s total traffic came from search engines, 50% of total traffic from Google, so Google was responsible for 71% of Wikipedia’s search engine visits.
One thought — I am certain that wiki results went up as soon as they added “nofollow” commands to every off-site link. In many non-commercial searches, say history related, wiki results went up from 7th to 3rd or from 5th to 1st, etc., in google. It is sad that wiki’s answer to their spam link problems was to destroy their editors’ rights to add good sites in a way that helped the sites.