Google Sending Wikipedia A Ton Of Traffic

Feb 19, 2007 at 9:09am ET by Barry Schwartz

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.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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3 COMMENTS ON Google Sending Wikipedia A Ton Of Traffic

AdamJusko, February 19th, 2007 at 2:54 pm ET:

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.

LeeAnn Prescott, February 20th, 2007 at 12:28 pm ET:

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.

W3 Search, February 22nd, 2007 at 8:00 am ET:

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.

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