Get Free Targeted Traffic With Wikipedia

About 2 months ago I wrote the post Leveraing Wikipedia For Free Traffic. Since it has been 2 months I figured now would be a good time to give you a quick update and let you know whether or not this would be worth trying out. To recap the post, I redesigned a site for my best friend who breeds monitors and pythons. She had created her site way back in 2004 by herself with no HTML knowledge and it just looked horrible.

A few months after the redesign I noticed that the site was starting to see some organic traffic from Google, which of course I was happy to see considering I did what I knew best back at the time SEO wise. Wanting to gain more traffic I ventured out looking for ways to find some. Noticing that Wikipedia has basically a page for almost anything out there I did a few searches for some related content and found 2 pages that already had some content on there. Believe it or not the content was actually from my best friend’s site!

So I decided to make it known that the content was from my friend’s site by sticking a reference next to the copied content and adding the appropriate link to the article. I didn’t think that I would receive any traffic whatsoever, I was actually pissed off that somebody had ripped her unique content without asking, but it happens. A few days after adding the link I noticed a few hits here and there from the article and the article is still sending some traffic. Here is a quick rundown of the stats from July 1 to September 10…

• 50 visits
• 5.74 pages per visit (51.18%)
• 2:12 average time on site (39.57%)
• 66% bounce rate (-7.48%)
• 96% new visits

Now I know you are thinking to yourself that that isn’t a whole lot of traffic and probably wondering why I am even posting this. Yes it isn’t a whole lot of traffic over 2 months but the fact is that my friend’s site is in an extremely small niche that has very little traffic anyways. But take a look again at the percentages, those are compared to the rest of the traffic that the site has been getting.

The traffic from Wikipedia views more pages and stays longer on the site. The bounce rate is higher but I am not too worried about that as that is something that has to do with the site design. So you can see from just those numbers that traffic from Wikipedia comes highly targeted and is searching for information. While the traffic for the entire site is mostly from Google, the traffic from Wikipedia visits almost twice as many pages and sticks around for almost twice as long. Imagine what those numbers could be after you add some quality information along with a link back to your site…..

Now before you go running off to Wikipedia and throwing up links all over the place, don’t spam it. I am not advocating the spamming of Wikipedia or any other method used to gain more authority then you should. If you are interested in getting free traffic to your site then either find an already created wiki page about a topic you like or start up a new one! Just please make sure that you spend your time on the wiki and provide information to others that will actually help. Remember, Wikipedia is human edited and if somebody comes across your article and sees your spam, you will be reported and your wiki may be deleted.