Wikipedia is simply a massive website that generates a significant volume of traffic. Since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, why not edit it to your advantage?
If you run a business, your first step is to give your business its own dedicated Wikipedia page. Write text in a manner to make your page sound ‘noteworthy’. There is much Wikipedia content that doesn’t deserve its own pages, I wouldn’t worry about your site not ‘fitting in’. For instance, just for Star Wars, there are pages dedicated to Star Wars bounty hunters, fictional planets, and silly irrelevant controversies like ‘Han shot first’. If fiction deserves a page, surely you can make a strong case that your real-life business deserves its own recognition.
When you’re writing, make sure you include all of your business accolades and your own biography, if you’re the business owner. Sometimes newly submitted Wikipedia pages get deleted and sometimes they stick. If it gets removed, there’s nothing wrong with trying and retrying. One of my Wikipedia pages has been up for 2 years- and is successfully inter-linked with other pages in Wikipedia. That should be your goal.
My most successful Wikipedia edit was placing an external link to my website on a PR 7 page. This link is still there and brings about 600 visitors a month to my external site. If your link is actually relevant and provides value to the page, then it won’t get removed for link spam. And once your link survives a critical initial time period of a month or so, it may fall off the radar for some editors prowling to reverse people’s changes.
As far as the value of the external link itself, sure, the link has the ‘no follow’ attribute and in theory shouldn’t pass along any PageRank (PR) value to Google. However, the link still delivers good traffic and some SEO professionals argue that Google still favors being linked to from Wikipedia, even though it goes unreported.
One nice side-effect of being linked to from Wikipedia is you get a lot of incoming links from other Wikipedia clones. Especially nice for a new website, you can get a lot of incoming links in short order, by simply placing one on a popular Wikipedia page and having it ’stick’. Since the Wikipedia content is in the public domain, other websites are free to copy to make their own websites and often do. So, what happens is you end up getting not just a link from Wikipedia, but every other Wikipedia clone. It can add up. A newly created website from summer of 2007 now has more than 400 incoming links from various Wikipedia clone sites. That’s a nice way to get a website off the ground, in terms of initial link building.
Take advantage of Wikipedia. Just because they have the ‘nofollow’ attribute doesn’t mean we should give up posting relevant, meaningful, external links. And if your page and/or link gets removed, try modifying to make the page more educational and more relevant and re-submit. Persistence will pay off. Eventually, you’ll find Wikipedia can be very good to you.
