Google is always evolving. But some things in the world of search never change.
One such thing is the presence of Wikipedia across the Google SERPs[1]. From queries about products and brands to celebrities and topical events, Wikipedia still features heavily across Google searches – even while our habits as search engine users change (with voice[2] and mobile[3] increasingly having an impact), and while Google itself works to make its results more intuitive and full of rich features.
Back in May my piece No need for Google[4] argued that wikis themselves were fantastic search engines in their own right (check out wiki.com if you want search results that delve into the content on Wikipedia as well as other numerous wikis). Wikipedia’s visibility on Google is testament to the continuing value and usefulness of “the free encyclopedia anyone can edit.”
So how does Wikipedia manage to maintain this visibility in 2018?
Natural ranking
Even in 2018, Google’s SERPs are still dominated by the organic rankings[5] – a list of web pages it deems relevant to your query based on a number of factors such as size, freshness of content, and the number of other sites linking into it.
Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia’s pages still do the job when it comes to appearing in Google’s organic rankings. It has massive authority, having been established for nearly 20 years and now boasting almost 6 million content pages. There has been plenty of time for inbound links to build up and there are an ever-growing number of pages on the domain giving other sites more reason to link back.
So Wikipedia is a massive, well-established site. It also does really