Blogs, brands, SEO and Wikipedia

Posted Saturday, May 26, 2007 at 12:08pm in Blogging, PR General  | 

I’ve been reading quite a lot of discussion relating to the rankings Google* gives to Wikipedia entries of late. In general, if you search for a brand using Google, chances are its Wikipedia entry will be there on the first page. Take, for example, Coca-Cola. A quick search shows that the soft drink company’s entry on the human-driven encyclopaedia comes up in fourth spot. Again, pull up a search using Microsoft as a search term and it’s right up there too.

Some people aren’t exactly happy about this and have went as far as to suggest that the leading search engine has manipulated its search results to accommodate Wikipedia. And again, this discussion isn’t new. Similar comments were made almost two years ago.

But Google isn’t manipulating anything. It’s blogs and organic SEO that are driving Wikipedia entries to the top of search results. If we go back to my two examples: Coca-Cola and Microsoft and run their Wikipedia entry urls through Technorati, like so:

Coca-Cola

Microsoft

In both examples you’ll see a considerable number of bloggers linking to each entry. Coca-Cola and Microsoft each have 110 and 1343 blogs linking to it respectively. Not surprisingly, Microsoft has a lot more.

Now, again, if we use these same results in Technorati but switch it to show links by authority like so:

Coca-Cola

Microsoft

In both cases you’ll see some reasonably authoritative sites linking to each. Microsoft’s more so than Coca-Cola’s. And how does Google partly measure whether to put a webpage further up the search engines? By measuring inbound links and their authority. Thus meaning that Google has no hidden agenda - it is merely reacting to the natural and unbiased blogging ecosystem driven by the people for the people. Anyone who actually reads this blog will know that I link to Wikipedia entries all the time - probably a bit too much in fact.

So what does this mean for brands? Well, I see two mechanisms at work here - both driven by the people. First you’ve got the Thinkers (those who write the Wikipedia entries) and then you’ve got the Linkers (those who link to them from their blogs). Both co-creating content and inextricably linked but each relatively unaware of one another. From a PR point of view, these two mechanisms are the cogs that turn the motor (Google) which inturn generates these high visibility search emissions.

So effectively, it isn’t Google that the brand should be explicitly concerned about - it’s the people that are powering it.

*I know there are other search engines but in this instance I just refered to Google as to keep it simple.

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