Leveraging Wikipedia for Free Traffic

For those that aren’t aware, Wikipedia.org is a MASSIVE site that has close to 2.5 million articles about anything and everything. The articles and information on it are edited by the public and can range from bowling to the Space Shuttle. Wikipedia has a huge amount of information and ranks extremely well in Google for keywords and phrases.

For those of you trying to make money from your site, one of the best kinds of traffic you can get to your site is free traffic. Wikipedia can provide free traffic to your site if you take the time to add an article to the site or to improve on an already created article. Now, free traffic is great to have because….well, its free! But Wikipedia goes far beyond free in bringing you traffic that is highly interested in the information on the page that you have created or edited.

I’ll give you an example. About 4 months ago I created a website for my best friend. She plans to start up a business soon with this site and so I mentioned that it may be a smart idea to get some articles on her site so that Google can start indexing the content and maybe send some traffic. She has had her domain for quite a few years, so I didn’t really have to worry about Google ignoring her domain. So she came up with about 8 articles, all hand written by her and completely 100% unique. About a week ago, I was messing around on her site and figured that I would run one of her pages through CopyScape.

CopyScape basically looks at your web page’s content and then searches the web for that exact content. A great way to find out if others have published your content online and whether or not they provided your site as a reference.

So I plugged in one of her pages and found at least 10 listings. The free version of CopyScape shows only the first 10 results. I proceeded to check out the first site to see whether or not they had given credit to my friend. Surely enough, I could not find a link to her site. I contacted my friend and asked her what she would like me to do. She is a pretty relaxed chick, so she didn’t really mind all that much.

Still being interested, I went on to check a few other listings. Surprisingly, one of the links that I saw was to an article on Wikipedia.org. This definitely caught my attention so I clicked on the listing and scanned the article. CopyScape has a great feature where they highlight the content from your page on the page of the site hosting the copyrighted material. So it didn’t take long for me to find the content.

Seeing as Wikipedia lets you edit articles and add more information or cite certain information, I thought that it would only be fair to add her site as a reference to the content that had been used from her site. This was my first time ever editing a page on Wikipedia so I went through the help files and found out how to add her site as a reference.

For those of you not wanting to scrounge through the help files and just want the answer right now, here is a quick example of how to add a site as a reference on Wikipedia. First, either create a page for an article or find an existing page that relates to your site. You have to be careful here though, if you decide to add any content, you have to make sure that it is relevant to the article and that is isn’t already repeated. If you are creating a page for an article, make sure that it is relevant and that you provide as much information as possible.

You don’t want to copy your site word for word because you don’t want to get penalized for duplicate content. Just find a way to stick some of your site’s content on the page somewhere where it will look normal and be relevant to the page. Find the last sentence of the content from your site and after the period you need to enter the following tag:

<ref>Your Link Here</ref>

That’s it! Pretty complicated huh? Go ahead and save the page and you will notice a number next to your site’s content. This number can be any number depending on how many references have already been made. At the end of the page, there will be a few sections pertaining to references in the article as well as other sections that share important information.

One of these sections will be called Notes. This is the section where your link will show up to your site. You can also find this section by clicking on the number next to your site’s content. The link will be to whatever link you used in the above example. While this is a free link, Wikipedia nofollows links so you will not receive any link juice or any added PageRank to your site. But hey, a free link to your site on the web’s largest, extremely popular and heaviest used article site should be more then enough of a reason to spend some time adding relevant content to the page.

How much traffic did I receive from Wikipedia you ask? Not much, 8 visits since June 30th, but my friend’s site is a really small niche that does not receive a lot of traffic anyways. But, if you create a page on a highly searched keyword or phrase and there are links on the page to your site, you are going to get some clicks through. And these people are already interested in the content that they found on Wikipedia, so make sure that when they land on your site, they find content highly relevant to what the page on Wikipedia is about.

Depending on what you have written about and how well your site is setup, you may even end up selling some products and making some money.

Free traffic is great and free highly targeted traffic is even better. So if you are looking for a way to build some more traffic to your site, I highly suggest trying out Wikipedia and seeing how well it performs for you.

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