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How does link building with Wikipedia work?

Building links is hard. Google scrutinizes website backlink profiles more closely than ever, and it’s extremely important to operate within their guidelines lest your site gets penalized and you lose all of your traffic.

In the race to get as many high quality backlinks as possible, many marketers and webmasters forget about Wikipedia. It’s definitely one of the most overlooked opportunities when it comes to building a strong backlink profile for your site.

For the most part, Wikipedia adheres to a very strict set of editorial guidelines. Every fact, example, and comparison must be fact-checked and preferably supported or verified by external citations and content from across the web.

The whole system is maintained by unpaid volunteer editors, too. And because Wikipedia is so enormously complex, the editors simply aren’t able to keep up with everything. That’s why they rely on the community to report broken links, inaccurate information, missing citations, article vandalism, and so on.

This opens up a great opportunity for webmasters looking to bolster their site’s link profile with Wikipedia’s assistance. If you publish legitimately helpful and high-quality content, there’s a very good chance you can position yourself as a citation or reference for a Wikipedia article.

In the past, people did this by manually searching for articles relevant to their business, and then manually combing through each and every article in the hopes of finding a dead link that needed to be replaced, a missing citation, or another opening where they could offer their own content up as a substantive reference.

With our tool, you don’t have to do the hard work anymore! Simply put in the keywords that describe your business or content, and we’ll trawl across Wikipedia identifying as many citation and missing-link opportunities as possible.

Backlinks from Wikipedia

Many people don’t pursue backlinks from Wikipedia because they’re all “nofollow” links, which means search engines like Google don’t count them as positive trust signals for your website.

However, there are numerous other benefits of acquiring backlinks from Wikipedia. Having a good mix of nofollow and dofollow links is absolutely necessary for any webmaster practicing SEO. It shows that you have a “natural” backlink profile, and not one built through blackhat, subversive methods.

Another reason Wikipedia links are so great is simply because of the traffic you can get from them. If your content can serve as a legitimate citation, reference, or example for a high-traffic Wikipedia article, lots of those readers will end up clicking through to your website.

As a final note: Even though links from Wikipedia are nofollow, there is speculation that Google’s algorithm still does take these links into account, at least to some extent.