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If you own a website and want to rank high in Google and other search engines, then you should already know just how important backlinks are for your website.
There is no doubt about the fact that content is king – a term you have most likely already heard in the past – a website is unlikely to outrank its competitors if it has no quality backlinks pointing to the site.
When it comes to building backlinks, however, marketers and website owners often tend to focus on building a large quantity of backlinks instead of turning their focus toward the quality of the backlinks they are building – this is the wrong way to build backlinks.
When Google looks at the backlink profile of a website or web page, the search engine’s algorithm will consider the quality of backlinks as a much more important attribute than the quantity of backlinks.
Thus, a website with 20 high quality backlinks could easily outrank a website with thousands of low quality backlinks.
Finding sources for high quality backlinks, however, can be tough.
Website owners are not always sure where they can find backlinks that will help to increase their rankings on search engines and help drive highly targeted traffic that can convert to their websites.
Why You Want a Backlink from Wikipedia
Even though it may sound difficult to find high quality backlink sources, it most certainly is possible if you do some research.
Keeping up with social media marketing trends, Google search trends and other trending topics on the internet can easily help you identify high-quality sites where you can gain a link from.
Wikipedia is one particularly popular website that website owners want to get backlinks from, but are often unsure how.
In this post, we are going to provide a step-by-step overview of how you can get a backlink to your website from Wikipedia.
First, however, we are going to take a look at some vital statistics about Wikipedia to help you realize just how powerful such a backlink can be for your website.
According to Expanded Ramblings, Wikipedia has over 22 million registered users and there are more than 38 million articles hosted on the platform.
Furthermore, the website receives at least 18 billion pageviews on a monthly basis and an average amount of 800 new articles are added to Wikipedia on a daily basis.
Alexa reports that Wikipedia is ranked number #5 globally and #7 in the United States, based on the popularity of all registered websites.
They also report that approximately 60.90% of all traffic on Wikipedia comes from search engines, with google.com, google.ru and google.co.in being the most popular referring sites.
Furthermore, over 1.6 million websites link to Wikipedia pages.
These stats offer solid evidence that Wikipedia backlinks are powerful and very useful – not only for your website’s current search engine rankings, but also for driving targeted traffic back to your own website.
These are not the only statistics of Wikipedia that are impressive. According to SEMRush, the website ranks for over 82 million different keywords.
CheckMoz also reports that Wikipedia’s domain has a Domain Authority of 100 and a Page Authority of 90.74 – which is much higher than most other domains that are on the internet and almost certainly higher than the domain metrics of the person trying to get backlinks to their own website.
How to Get Wikipedia Backlinks
Now that we have reviewed the importance of getting a Wikipedia backlink, it is time to discuss how a website owner can achieve this particular goal.
Even though most people do not know exactly how the process works and how they can get a backlink from Wikipedia, the process is much simpler than they might think.
We are going to discuss the most popular method utilized for building a backlink on the site. But first, we need to discuss one particularly important factor that needs to be implemented beforehand.
If you post a backlink to your website on Wikipedia simply for the purpose of helping you with your content marketing and internet marketing strategy, then the moderators that controls the data on Wikipedia will most likely detect your intentions and block your link.
You want to contribute to Wikipedia and then, once you have gained some trust, add a link to your site.
It is also not possible to post a link on any page if you are a new member; thus you will first need to build some credibility for yourself.
Step 1: Setting Up Your Account and Building Credibility
The very first step you need to take if you would like to get a high-quality backlink from Wikipedia is to register an account with Wikipedia.
To do this, simply visit http://wikipedia.org and click on the “Create account” button at the top of the website.
This will take you to their account registration page, where you need to fill out a short form with a username, password and your email address.
Once you have created your account and verified your email address, you should log in to your Wikipedia account.
Now you need to start building some credibility for yourself. To do this, you will need to make some contributions to articles that are already hosted on Wikipedia.
Use the “Search Wikipedia” form to search for keywords in a niche you have experience and knowledge in. Then try to find articles that needs editing.
See if you can add any value to these existing articles, or maybe correct any information that is incorrect. Do not add any links to your website while you are trying to build credibility.
You can, however, link out to popular websites that have a lot of authority in the particular niche the article you are editing is about.
Step 2: Find a Broken Link and Create Appropriate Content on Your Website
Once you have built some credibility for your account on Wikipedia, it is time to move on to the next step.
The next step is to find a broken link that you could potentially replace on an article hosted on Wikipedia.
The easiest way to find broken links on Wikipedia is to head over to Google and do a search like this:
Site:Wikipedia.org “keyword” “dead link”
You should replace “keyword” with a keyword related to your niche. Everything else should stay the same in your Google search.
This will give you a list of Wikipedia pages that contains the keyword you are searching for, as well as a dead link notice at the bottom of the article – perfect opportunities for building a link to your website.
Start to visit each of the pages in your Google search result. Once you land on a page, use your browser’s build in find feature to find the word “dead link”.
You can usually access the find feature by pressing both Ctrl and F.
Once you find a link with a “dead link” notice next to it, you should copy the URL of that link and paste it into an online tool called Wayback Machine.
This will give you a preview of the content that was once hosted on that particular URL.
Analyze the content that was hosted on the URL before it went dead and see if you can create similar content on your own website.
If so, then make a note of the Wikipedia page where you found the dead link, as well as the original content that appeared on that link before.
The next step is to create an article with similar content on your own website.
Do NOT copy the content from Wayback Machine and paste it on your website. Rather, create a new article and improve on the old content wherever possible.
Step 3: Claim Your Link
Now that you have found a dead link on Wikipedia and created relevant content on your own website, it is time to claim your backlink on that Wikipedia page.
To do so, you need to be signed into your Wikipedia account.
Simply navigate to the page where you saw the dead link, click on the “edit page” link and then replace the dead link with a link to the web page where you created the content in the previous step.
Remember to remove the “dead link” notice next to the link when you replace the old link with your updated link.
This is all it takes to get Wikipedia backlinks. The steps are relatively simple and it is definitely not hard to gain such a backlink.
It is important to build credibility first. Also, ensure the content on your website you are going to link to is relevant to the content that was originally hosted on the particular link that no longer works.
Conclusion
Backlinks are very important for high search engine rankings. But website owners should focus on building quality links instead of just trying to build a lot of links to their sites.
There are many ways to get high quality links to point to a website. And Wikipedia is certainly one of the better quality websites you most definitely want a link or two from.
Unfortunately, most website owners do not know how they can get links from this authoritative source. However, if you’d like to explore this a little further, Matt Garrett’s software can help you get backlinks from Wikipedia quicker.
In this post, we explained how you can gain exposure for your website from Wikipedia by placing a backlink on the site that points to your site.
We also looked at how a backlink from Wikipedia can help drive quality traffic back to you.
Now what are you waiting for? Go get yourself some Wikipedia backlinks! 😉
