Immediately after its creation, Wikipedia the free encyclopedia became the most preferred source of information. Therefore, web researchers didn’t need to go through Google`s million search results. Soon after, people realized they could not cite Wikipedia as a credible source of information even for college thesis paper.
Photo by Oberon Copeland @veryinformed.com on Unsplash
The reason for this shortfall was because of its user-edited nature. Surprisingly, it turns out that Wikipedia is a good platform for digital marketing. Use of Wikipedia as a marketing platform has been going on for a very long time. Established brands like Apple and Coca-Cola have Wikipedia presence, and this has helped the companies become popular.
There are various reasons why Wikipedia marketing and branding is still a valuable venture!
Originally posted under my old account (thx thispersondoesnotexist)!
Wikipedia: Past & Future
The fact that Wikipedia is a good platform for digital marketing might be a shocker to digital marketers. The reality is that it is one of the places where successful businesses have been flocking to market their products. Consider the fact that Wikipedia is a resourceful site when it comes to sources of information.
Do you remember the emergence of the “Knowledge graph”? Google started pulling information from Wikipedia pages to fill the knowledge graph.
To help us understand the effect that Wikipedia can have on reputation management, it is helpful to understand that one of the most common goals of reputation management is to push any negative content that shows up on the first page of Google results to the second page and beyond. After all, the click thru rate for page two results on Google is less than 2%. Logically, you can reduce the effects of negative information about your company by 98% if you can push the negative content to the second page. This is where reputation management companies make their money.
The bulk of revenue for reputation management companies involves pushing negative content to the 2nd page of Google. There are various methods used to do so, but the most common involves article writing. Well-written articles strategically placed on different websites and optimized with the correct keywords will cause the articles to rise to page one in Google.
Once those articles move up to page one, the negative content will be pushed to the bottom and more than likely to the 2nd or 3rd page of Google. The articles written by reputation management companies contain positive or neutral information about the company they are writing for so that anyone who clicks on the article will not be led to the negative press that previously showed up on the 1st page.
Using Wikipedia for reputation management can turn out to be a thorn for many and here is why. Once a Wikipedia page is created, it is unlikely to ever be deleted as long as it meets notability guidelines. This means that once your page is created, it will be there forever. If you are not already familiar with how Wikipedia works, it is an open community of editors where anyone can edit; you don’t even need an account.
So, even if you have the most gleaming positive article in Wikipedia now, that doesn’t mean that what you wrote will stay there forever. Editors can come along and introduce and/or change information in the article as long as there is a reliable source to back up the edit they performed.
Start by Creating a Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia is a good place to get started for businesses that wish to establish an online presence. If people find information about your brand on Wikipedia, they are more likely to read what is on Wikipedia before checking out your website! A question that emerges is how can Wikipedia be used as a digital marketing tool by marketers?
Here is a guide for implementing Wikipedia marketing that digital marketers need to follow. Therefore, when you want to incorporate Wikipedia in your digital marketing, consider the following.
To include Wikipedia marketing as one of your digital marketing strategies, you need a Wikipedia page first. As illustrated above, Wikipedia page acts as a source of information for Google`s Knowledge Graph. Globally, Wikipedia ranks number five relative to other sites. In the United States alone, the website ranks number 6. (Alexa.com).
Therefore, it is important for digital marketers to consider creating a Wikipedia page so as to take advantage of this great popularity. But wait, who qualifies to create a page on Wikipedia? This is a question that many people would ask. Notability is a test that is used by editors when they want to decide that the topic was chosen warrants an article.
Ideally, a topic is presumed by Wikipedia to be suitable for its own article if it has received a noteworthy coverage in independent reliable sources. Therefore, before you start creating a page for your company, it is important to ensure you choose a topic that has received in-depth coverage from reliable sources. It is important to ensure you meet independence criteria when choosing a relevant topic.
By the way — wikipedia “likes” IPs of universities and institutes very much, so you can add an article from their computers or their IPs. This way the article is more likely to be approved!
There are additional guidelines to be allowed to create a Wikipedia page. For instance, your Wikipedia page should not create a conflict of interest. In addition, the content published on Wikipedia page should take neutrality point of view. You should also practice civility before you publish content on Wikipedia.
Take Advantage of Wikipedia Backlinks
Wikipedia has managed to build itself as an incredible and a high profile website that is full of authority. SEO experts might argue that Wikipedia backlinks are no follow and therefore have no significant value when it comes to digital marketing. However, the truth is that the Wikipedia backlinks carry significant importance when it comes to making your brand visible. Therefore, it is advisable that digital marketers take advantage of the Wikipedia backlinks. Note that adding backlinks on Wikipedia page will not give you any link juice.
Wikipedia backlinks have a huge potential when it comes to positioning and authority when being cited on a Wikipedia article. Consider adding in-text links that point to another Wikipedia page. For instance, you might want to find articles on Wikipedia that need sources.
This could also be sources that could fit into your articles. For example, you can take advantage of the articles that need to be expanded and add in a relevant source. Note that you need to go through thousands of articles to be expanded to find the right one that suits you. However, to make the experience better, take advantage of third-party tools like Wikigrabber, which helps Wikipedia article creators find pages that need sources.
Dead links opportunity is also good enough when it comes to Wikipedia backlinking. Probably your content is what the Wikipedia moderators have been looking for. Therefore, grab the opportunity to make your brand more visible online.
Keep on Monitoring your Presence on Wikipedia
We began by illustrating how Wikipedia credibility as a cited source in academia failed. Should this be the reason why you need to monitor your Wikipedia presence continuously? However, just like in any other digital marketing strategy, you need to monitor how well Wikipedia marketing performs.
As you monitor your Wikipedia marketing, you also want to be sure not just anyone else will manage your Wikipedia marketing content. When it comes to monitoring the Wikipedia marketing content, you can use various approaches. These include the Enabling Notifications on Wikipedia:
To begin with, it is important to make sure you have an active Wikipedia account. Since you already have Wikipedia page and your Wikipedia marketing content on the page, it’s obvious that you signed for the account. Now, you need to add your business or personal e-mail through which you will be receiving notifications from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia allows you to subscribe for notifications whenever you want to receive important alerts like edited Wikipedia marketing content. To do so, Navigate to your Wikipedia page, and on the top of the page, you will see Preferences tab on the right-hand side. Click on the preferences tab, and you will see Notifications. Once you open the notifications tab, you will have options for setting how to receive the notifications and the frequency. Set the frequency to daily for close monitoring.
You might also wish to add your Wikipedia marketing content page to your watch list. There is a “Watchlist” tab on the top side of the Wikipedia page that you can use to add the page to your watch list.
Avoid Using Wikipedia as a Promotional Tool
Wikipedia guidelines indicate clearly that the content published can be promotional (NPOV means not taking sides) but content is only included so long as it is reliably sourced in any case. Therefore, using the platform as a promotional tool sometimes may lead to a violation of the rules.
Ideally, the website requires you to publish only content that takes complete neutrality. Therefore any page that contains promotional tone is pulled down literally (Legalmorning).
When referring to Wikipedia marketing, note that our argument emphasizes on creating an online brand visibility and not publishing promotional content. For promotional content, the publisher will use a biased tone with the intention of attracting buyer’s attention. However, with getting your brand visible, it is not necessary for you to write promotional content. Most importantly, avoid using promotional (one-sided) tone on Wikipedia. Therefore, only use unbiased tone when creating Wikipedia page content.
Lastly, make sure you have updated the information that you publish on Wikipedia!
Keep Wikipedia Pages Up To Date
We have said that Wikipedia offers a good potential for marketers because of the high authority the site enjoys. Note that the information on Wikipedia will be verified and high accuracy is important to earn credibility. Therefore, it is important to ensure you have updated the information on Wikipedia page to reflect a high degree of accuracy. Otherwise, your Wikipedia marketing efforts will not be fruitful.
Note that if you maintain updated content on Wikipedia, you are increasing your brand’s trust online. Consider that if your clients find inaccurate information, this breaches the trust and affects your brand credibility overall.
For example, let’s say you have published information indicating that you operate in five European countries. In a likely event that you have shut down in two of the countries, update this information immediately.
This is important so that you will not be misguiding the people who will be viewing your Wikipedia content. Again, this has a negative effect because your content lacks accuracy. Overdeveloped pages on your company risk being frowned upon by the community members.
This amounts to enough reasons why the page should be removed from Wikipedia. Factual Wikipedia marketing content will rank high in search results. Therefore, if you are aiming at appearing in the top results, you should only publish content that is up to date. As a rule of thumb, also makes sure your content is unbiased.
Use Photos within Wikipedia Marketing Content
We have talked about the Google Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge graph also captures images to display as part of the information. Images have a huge potential since they attract more page views. Therefore, it is always a good idea to ensure that you have added images to your Wikipedia page.
Make sure the images that you use of high quality. Blurred images affect the quality score when posted online. Basically, it is important to include the images that your potential clients easily identify. Also, the color code used should represent your brand so that your clients and the audience viewing your Wikipedia page can easily identify your brand on search results.
Are you gathering data about your brand from the Web and Social Media?
Seeing this data is possible by performing simple search on Google or Social Media, but it’s really hard to make sense of it, by looking it sparingly in this way. This is where Social Media Monitoring tools come into play. You can use a tool like this to automatically gather all this data for you everyday, analyze it, and give you useful insights that you can extremely helpful for your brand.
What’s more, you can also get access to the same data for your competitors. Also, you can monitor keywords and phrases related to your industry, and this way you can get very useful consumer insights in real-time. These insights could cost hundreds of dollars to acquire from a research agency.
Checking if Website Has a Ban From Google. How to Recover?
Ban in search engines may come for various reasons, mainly because of attempts to manipulate the search and use prohibited methods to promote your site.
In order to check for a ban on Google, you simply need to enter this in the search bar:
site:sitename.com
Instead of sitename.com substitute the name of your site. If you are shown not 10–12 pages of queries, but only 5–10 queries, then the site is sanctioned. But just do not index the site in search engines does not mean that it was your site is banned, you must also check whether your site is not closed from indexation.
It is always necessary to identify the reasons why this happened, eliminate bugs and return the site back in search. If the site will not be indexed, and will not be present in the search, the SEO promotion of the site is useless.
How to Get Back In:
Of course, to get back in, you have to submit a re-inclusion request. Yep you have to swallow your pride and beg on your knees depending on how much you value your domain name.
According to a SEO-hackers, you can also give a tweet to Google Webspam team’s program manger Brian White: @brianwhite just to say “Hi, my site’s been sandboxed.”
Google probably knows each and every detail of your offense against them. If you fail to tell them anything regarding your offense (and perhaps say you’re sorry for each and that you will never do it again) they’ll make it harder for you to get back in if not reject you altogether. Google spam team wants a full accounting of what you did.
If that Doesn’t Work…
Raise the white flag and move on to another domain. Google probably won’t include you back again anymore. All we can do is hope for Google to be nice and include us back again. Unfortunately, Google can also catch bad moods. Sometimes you have to decide that it’s time to move on and leave the hopes of getting your site indexed back again.
Hackers and spammers carry same intention , so they don’t care about Google , as we are normal blogger or webmasters must convey the Google’s rules:
-
Don’t create post exclusively to give links to some website(s).
-
Don’t create artificial links which is not related to your website category or topic.
-
Don’t post your website links on irrelevant sites, illegal websites, porn websites or spam websites or link exchange or bulk emails.
-
Don’t join in a link scheme. Don’t post your website link on those link schemes.
-
Don’t participate in Widget spam or don’t put widget on your site pointing towards spammy websites (in other words Spammy Links Building or exchange websites)
-
Don’t involve in Paid links from irrelevant websites or spammy websites which is already discussed above. Putting your website links on spammy websites Google distrust your website entirely or partially depending on the number of links your site getting from those spammy websites.
-
Don’t involve in Guest Book Spam, Blog Spam, Excessive Articles Submission, Excessive Link Submission via Link submission software.
-
Don’t give Anchor text name for your widget for a particular keyword or phrase. Google consider this also spam. If your widget 100% relevant one and also link to particular website also in same category with higher page rank then there is no problem. If your widget links pointing towards spammy website. Then your site will be penalized by Google for such practices.
-
Don’t give Top or Below links in the same post too often. Don’t give too many links to other part of your website (other post or other pages of your website) always follow Google Webmaster Guidlines.
-
Don’t approve readers comment before you read the comment fully and also make sure that readers posting URL’s 100% relevant to your post or page or your website “niche”. If your reader try to put some spammy links or irrelevant links on the comment then you will be the loser. Your page rank will drop down drastically and your website taken out of Google Search Index for that post or page or entire website on a whole. So beware of spammy comments on your website!
Political Issues
Identity is very important in the world of politics, especially when voters have difficulty choosing one of the many candidates. And given the number of opinion polls being conducted online, politicians should be especially vigilant about their reputation on the Internet.
The recommendations below will be useful for absolutely anyone who monitors their image, but they will be especially critical for those who spin in political circles.
1. Wikipedia
Although Wikipedia prohibits politicians (or their supporters) from creating pages dedicated to them, having such an asset can be a huge plus for your Internet reputation. Wikipedia pages almost always take the first or second position in search results, which means that they are traditionally trusted and receive a significant amount of traffic.
In addition, most users start their search online from reputable and neutral sources like Wikipedia, so having such a page is critical to attracting undecided and non-partisan voters. If no one has created such a page for you so far, you should assign it to your reputable agency, which will take care of its further maintenance and monitoring.
2. Blog
Having a politician’s own blog or website can be a great opportunity to communicate with interested voters, promote their values, ideals, publish campaign news and any other important information related to your image.
A personal blog is especially important for a politician’s online reputation for the following reasons:
-
It allows you to communicate your views, values and beliefs
-
It is very easy and fast to place your campaign news, press releases, videos and other materials illustrating your position.
-
Regularly updated blog is more trustworthy and keeps your supporters informed about the latest news.
-
Blogs are usually ranked higher in search engines, so it will be easier for voters to find information about you.
-
You can always control the content of your own blog or website!
3. SEO
Even a regularly updated blog cannot take the first positions by itself. This will require the use of search engine optimization technologies (SEO), which allows blogs or sites to take high positions in search results. And the higher your content is in results, the more people visit your official website, blog or other controlled resources instead of visiting sites with negative information.
Even a regularly updated blog cannot take the first positions by itself. This will require the use of search engine optimization technologies (SEO), which allows blogs or sites to take high positions in search results. And the higher your content is in results, the more people visit your official website, blog or other controlled resources instead of visiting sites with negative information.
The most important aspects of SEO for politicians include:
-
The use of keywords (such as the candidate’s name, campaign slogan) in the cover and description of pages, URLs, article headers, alt tags of pictures and directly in the text of articles.
-
Regular updating of the site so that search robots visit it more often (this is one factor in the high rating of blogs)
-
Links to trusted and useful sites for visitors
-
Incoming links from trust and useful resources, such as your personal Wikipedia page or the official party site
-
Social networks. Profiles of policy in social networks usually have good positions in the search engine and allow to displace negative references from the TOP-10. They also allow you to reveal yourself on the other, less official side and make it easier to communicate your values. On the other hand, they can be a real headache if you don’t work with them properly. The most important thing not to do in social networks is to publish everything that can cast the slightest shadow on you, even if at first glance it seems quite harmless.
4. SERM & ORM
SERM — a set of measures to optimize search engine output in the interests of business. Consumers enter the brand name in search engines (e.g. Google) and receive objective information about the company’s services.
SERM is applied in the field of Public Relation, crisis management and complex directions of Internet marketing. In each area the perception and application of SERM is different. Monitoring of social networks and Google search output is also part of SERM. It is used by companies represented on the Internet and media personalities. The main task of SERM is to build a search output as favorable as possible for business. The potential client enters the company name into the search line and receives objective information about the brand: official website, communities in social networks, services, reviews and portfolio. Accordingly, this is prevented by negative and outdated information.
SERM fights with negative and biased information about the brand in Google search engine. Depending on the popularity of internet sites and the content of negative reviews, unwanted information can cost up to 80% of potential customers. SERM is based on the behavioral factors of modern consumers who are used to the availability of information. According to surveys, 74% of potential customers will additionally look for information about the company if they are interested in its advertising offer. Traditional marketing alone is no longer enough.
At the same time, up to 70% of consumers may refuse to interact with the brand if they see a few negative feedback in the search engine or on sites-reviews. Reputation management in search engines is considered a long-term investment aimed at building consumer confidence. A well-established toolkit for working with online reputation has been formed among SERM specialists, but periodically technologies change!
5. Popular Methods:
-
Monitoring. A SERM specialist studies search output. This is necessary to understand the information background around a brand. Also used a method to calculate losses from negative on the Internet. Any work within the framework of reputation correction begins with monitoring.
-
Creation of own sites. Blogs, business cards sites and profiles in professional communities are necessary for a wide coverage of the brand. This work is aimed at different target audiences. Positioning varies for each consumer group.
-
Registration in catalogs. Such sites collect contact information and brand services. Catalog sites are well indexed by search engines. That is why SERM-specialists monitor the updating of information in the catalogs.
-
Posting of reviews. Together with the marketing department, actions are developed to encourage positive reviews. All existing references are also worked through. On average, customers trust user reviews 12 times more than advertising materials.
-
Removal of the negative. Experienced negotiators, social engineers and conflictologists are involved in this work. Within the framework of legal feedback removal, we search for pain points and reasons for the author’s dissatisfaction with the negative. In the course of negotiations, company representatives resolve the disputed situation. In the case of libel and similar violations of the law, a legal effect is applied.
Reputation management in search engines involves creating brand protection. Negative links, if they appear, are harder to break into the top of the Google search engine. The main positions are already occupied by managed or loyal sites of the brand.
SERM does not compete with traditional advertising campaigns. Reputation management complements a marketing strategy focused on recognition. Customers are tired of fighting for their attention, so the concept of advertising blindness has appeared!
If you want to support my work, please, consider donating me:
-
0xB25C5E8fA1E53eEb9bE3421C59F6A66B786ED77A or officercia.eth — ETH
-
17Ydx9m7vrhnx4XjZPuGPMqrhw3sDviNTU — BTC
-
4AhpUrDtfVSWZMJcRMJkZoPwDSdVG6puYBE3ajQABQo6T533cVvx5vJRc5fX7sktJe67mXu1CcDmr7orn1CrGrqsT3ptfds — Monero XMR
-
More addresses:Â github.com/OffcierCia/support.