Gradiva Couzin, Author at Gravity Search Marketing

Ask the Experts: Should My Business Make a Wikipedia…

March 5, 2014
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: I recently noticed that a competitor of ours has a page on Wikipedia for their business. How can I get one for myself? Will it help my ranks?

A: Some of our clients have asked if a Wikipedia page for their product or brand can improve their website ranks.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia containing over 30 million articles on a wide variety of topics. A Wikipedia page will not directly improve your site’s ranks. The links on Wikipedia that point to your website are tagged with “nofollow,” which means that Google won’t transfer any link authority from Wikipedia to a your website.

Despite this, a Wikipedia page for your business or brand can still be beneficial in other ways:

A Wikipedia page can rank well in search results alongside your site and your other branded properties. As such, a Wikipedia page can be a nice way to influence more of the search results than you would have without the page.
Wikipedia pages may help with brand awareness. Wikipedia is a top website and receives billions of page views each month. It’s possible that some Wikipedia users may naturally stumble upon your Wikipedia page, or find it via a link from other Wikipedia pages on similar topics.
Google uses Wikipedia as a source for its “artificial intelligence” projects and currently draws summary information from Wikipedia to produce its Google Knowledge Graph listings. If your product has a Google Knowledge Graph, you may be able to influence the content via your Wikipedia page.

Any company is technically eligible to have a Wikipedia page. However, the best Wikipedia pages cite third-party information sources, such as online newspapers, magazines, trade publications or reputable published authors. If there is already published information about your company readily available online, you’re ready for a Wikipedia page.

If you lack third-party articles about your company, consider increasing your public relations efforts first. You may wish to create a press kit or press release and reach out to a writer or the editor of a local news website in your community. After your first third-party interview or article is published online, you are ready for a Wikipedia page. If you only have one or two published articles about your company, consider a somewhat brief Wikipedia page as a start. You can build up your Wikipedia page content over time, revisiting the Wikipedia page at any time and increasing its content as subsequent media articles are published about your company.

When you are ready, here are some tips for creating a good Wikipedia page about your business.

Tip 1: Article Layout

It’s important to select an article layout template that meets established Wikipedia standards. We recommend finding existing articles on Wikipedia that contain similar content to your new article. You may want to base your article’s layout on a layout of an existing article.

Tip 2: Avoid Self-Promotion

It is important to maintain an impartial, fact-based tone in a Wikipedia article. We recommend avoiding the use of excessive or enthusiastic adjectives and self-promotional language. When an article contains any self-promotion, it can be flagged for removal.

Tip 3: Explain Industry Jargon

Ideally, the article should be understandable for anyone, even industry outsiders. We recommend avoiding abbreviations with which industry outsiders might be unfamiliar. For example, instead of writing about “SEO,” we would recommend writing about “search engine optimization (SEO)” and linking this text to a Wikipedia article on this topic, for those who want to learn more.

Tip 4: Link to Other Articles

A good Wikipedia article links to other articles. For example, a Microsoft article links to related Wikipedia articles about software, computing, video games and more. As a rule of thumb, we recommend linking to other articles at least once in each paragraph.

Tip 5: Add Citations & References

A good Wikipedia article includes a citation or reference for each claim stated in the article that could possibly be challenged. Ideally, citations & references should come from reliable, third party sources such as news/media. A poor reference source would be an article from your own website or blog, because it is not third-party.

Tip 6: Disambiguation

Some Wikipedia articles share the same name but are about unique topics. In order to distinguish between these articles, disambiguation is added to the titles. For example, Wikipedia has at least 10 articles entitled “John Smith.” As such, article authors add disambiguation in parentheses after the initial title:

“John Smith (explorer)”
“John Smith (actor)”
“John Smith (wrestler)”

If your company or product name shares its name with others, we recommend use of disambiguation in your article’s title.

Tip 7: Disclosure

As of February 2014, Wikipedia is considering a paid disclosure policy, in which editors would need to disclose if they are making Wikipedia edits as part of a paid arrangement. If enacted, the disclosure policy would require a paid editor to make a public statement, such as “I work for [company name] and make edits on its behalf” on the editor’s talk page or on edit summaries. (Talk pages are designed to allow Wikipedia editors to talk and leave messages, while edit summaries are designed to help editors understand what has changed on a Wikipedia page.)

Wikipedia encourages all editors to adhere to certain standards, including maintaining a neutral point of view without bias or use of any marketing language (see Tip 2). The disclosure policy is intended to encourage paid editors to meet these standards and avoid possible conflicts of interest. This policy may or may not be enacted, but its discussion highlights Wikipedia’s commitment to impartial information. We encourage all editors to adhere to Wikipedia’s guidelines. Learn more about the Wikipedia disclosure policy.

Tip 8: Adoption

If you are an editor creating a Wikipedia page for the first time, you may wish to consider participating in Wikipedia’s “Adopt a User program,” in which experienced editors will mentor new users in an effort to help them become more familiar with Wikipedia.

If you need additional advice about a potential Wikipedia page, read up on some advice from Wikipedia: Wikipedia: Writing better articles.

articles and interviews

Tracking Encrypted Yahoo Search with Google Analytics

February 26, 2014
by Gradiva Couzin

By now you have heard, and may have seen, that Yahoo is now starting to encrypt its search data. Many of the more popular news outlets have already discussed Yahoo’s transition to the new age of encrypted search, and you can read up about it in more detail via this link: Yahoo Makes Secure Search The Default

As with Google, Yahoo is no longer passing the search query from the user, but on top of that, it is no longer coming into Google Analytics as Organic traffic. This is a bit of a pain when you’d like to keep your marketing channels in their respective corners. What does the new encrypted Yahoo come in as? We heard early reports that Yahoo would not send any referrer data, and you’d see an increase in Direct traffic. However, from what we have seen reviewing Yahoo search and our Analytics data, this does not appear to be the case.

At this time, Yahoo appears to be sending referrer data that can still be identified within Google Analytics under the domain: r.search.yahoo.com. So, Yahoo is being categorized as a Referral source as seen in the image below:

Given that Yahoo is sending still sending a referral source, we can grab hold of that and categorize it as Organic traffic within Google Analytics.

The first method you may try is to set it up as a new Organic Search Source which is easily done with Universal Analytics. Unfortunately, this method is not possible as a required component for this setup is a query parameter which is not present in Yahoo’s referring URL.

The next option to try (and the one that worked for us) is to use Google Tag Manager to specify the traditional UTM tracking fields based on the referral source. This setup is pretty simple if you are currently using Google Tag Manager to manage your Google Analytics code. If you don’t know what Google Tag Manager is, check out the site for more details: https://www.google.com/tagmanager/

Steps to Track Yahoo Search in Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager

1. Create a new Rule based on Yahoo’s referrer information: r.search.yahoo.com

2. Create a new Tag for Google Analytics and set it up as a Page View. We are using Universal Analytics, but this should be applicable to Classic Google Analytics as well. Below are the following details you will want to specify:

Under “Fields to Set”

campaignKeyword : (not provided)
campaignMedium : organic
campaignSource : yahoo (encrypted)

Set the Firing Rule to the Yahoo Search rule you previously created. Below are the full details of our tag:

3. To avoid firing the Analytics code twice on the page, you will want to add a Blocking Rule to the main Tag that executes your Google Analytics code. The Blocking Rule you will add is the same rule you created in the first step for the Yahoo referrer.

4. When the new and updated tags and rules are saved, create and publish the new version.

5. Verify! Easiest method is to visit Yahoo, search for your site and view Real-Time tracking within Google Analytics. If all went according to plan, you should see something like this:

If all stays the same on Yahoo’s end, you’ll now start seeing this Yahoo traffic appear under the Organic channels in Google Analytics reporting.

If Yahoo changes the way it processes the encrypted search, this method may no longer work. As you may have heard as well, Bing is starting to encrypt its data; as of now, it is currently optional and still evolving. Unfortunately, the method Bing is using at this moment does not pass any referrer data to most sites, causing their search traffic to come in as Direct traffic. The only work-around is to place your entire site on HTTPS in order to identify Bing’s referring properties. The reason for this is due to browsers not passing information when a site goes from HTTPS to HTTP. In Bing’s instance, unlike Google and Yahoo, they are directing their traffic directly from the HTTPS source.

We hope this helps you start tracking Yahoo as Organic traffic again. And, let us know if you are seeing different behavior from Yahoo than we are seeing.