“A public encyclopedia that anyone can write and edit, even without being logged in?!  And this concoction will serve as the sum of all human knowledge! Madness!” the critics wailed.

Today, it’s hard to imagine life without Wikipedia, which has blossomed into the 7th most popular website in the world¹ and inspired the creation of some 2.8 million articles on the English version of the site alone.  Recently, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales was kind enough to feed my questions about the Wikimedia Foundation’s goals, likely future, and ballooning cultural relevance.  I also gave him an opportunity to respond to Wikipedia’s “professional troublemakers”–er critics.

How do you think Wikipedia will evolve as technology evolves?  Can you foresee, by say 2020, a way for Wikipedians to create editable, interactive videos about a topic?

I think we’ll see a lot of advances in video.  One of the things I like to point out is that Wikipedia is a social innovation, not a technical innovation.  All the tools necessary to create Wikipedia existed in 1995 when Ward Cunningham invented the wiki editing concept.  Webserver, web browser, database, wiki.

What technologies already exist today for collaborative video editing that no one has created the social structures to use?

Well, having said that, I will also say that words are far more fluid than video, and always will be.  If I don’t quite like what you have written, I can adjust it slightly until we are both satisfied.  But once a video has been shot, there is a very limited set of things that can be done about it.

British-American author Andrew Keen, the self-described antichrist of Silicon Valley, gets a kick out of regularly blasting Wikipedia. I watched your February 2008 debate with Keen, and I agreed with some of Keen’s points, but I found his fixation on the length of Wikipedia articles to be a bit odd.  He pointed out that the Harry Potter article is longer than the Hamlet article, and because Hamlet is more historically significant, this somehow represents a shortcoming in Wikipedia.  Do you find his logic lacking?

I don’t think the words “Andrew Keen” and “logic” generally belong in the same sentence.  No, I’m just teasing!

I actually agree with _some_ of Keen’s points, as would any thinking person. But the overall thrust of his argument is not compelling to me.

Regarding the question of the length of Wikipedia entries, I don’t find the argument compelling at all.  Wiki is not paper, and it isn’t as if we “cut” the Hamlet entry in order to make more room for “Harry Potter”.  And I rather suspect that Keen would agree with me when I say that I wouldn’t find it a very good idea to push the Potter fans to write about Hamlet.

Some criticisms about Wikipedia entries of various lengths is actually misplaced simply due to how we slice-and-dice the world.  It is likely that our entry on “China” is shorter than our entry on “Harry Potter” too.  But that’s more because we have a short overview article on “China” and then break out specific topics into separate articles.

What happens normally is that when one entry gets too long, people will naturally want to break it up.  I have been told that Britannica’s entry on “World War II” is more than 100 pages long.  (I haven’t checked.) Wikipedia’s entry is much shorter, but our overall coverage of World War II is much more in-depth than Britannica.  It’s just that in the medium of HTML on the web, it makes little sense to force the reader to download a 100 page document.  Better to give them 5-10 pages in a chunk, with lots of hyperlinks and timelines to help them navigate thousands of pages of detailed material.

When I was a student at Ohio State, I had Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger as a philosophy professor.  Sanger had a policy that if you used Wikipedia as a source on a paper, you would receive an automatic five point deduction. Do you think Wikipedia is reliable enough at this stage to pass as a source on an academic paper?

I would do the same thing if I were teaching a course at a university. I would also deduct 5 points for citing Britannica.  This is simply not the proper role for an encyclopedia, no matter how good, in the research process.  A high quality encyclopedia is a starting point, giving us broad background knowledge and helping us to firmly and correctly fill in gaps, not an original source.  The right thing to do is to quickly read the Wikipedia entry to get your bearings, and then go read the original sources.

Do you still dispute Sanger’s designation as Wikipedia’s co-founder?

I think the whole debate is silly.  Ironically, I think Larry is given too little credit for his role in the early days of Wikipedia as the “editor-in-chief” of the project (his actual title).  He was an employee working fully under my direction with no ownership interest of any kind.

Wikia.com, another of your projects, gives people an opportunity to create and develop their own special-interest wiki communities. The site now boasts over 800,000 articles and some 200,000 registered users.  Is Wikia’s growth on pace with your expectations?

Yes, although we’re much bigger than 800,000 articles and 200,000 registered users.  We’ve been growing at a similar pace to Wikipedia, but being 3 years younger, we are 3 years smaller.  I think we’re just now beginning to enter the broader public consciousness, as Neilsen just named us as the 5th fastest growing community site.

Larry Sanger, now the Editor-and-Chief of Citizendium, takes jabs at Wikipedia on a Citizendium page titled Why Citizendium? He writes, “Wikipedia is full of serious problems. Many of the articles are written amateurishly. Too often they are mere disconnected grab-bags of factoids, not made coherent by any sort of narrative.”  Do you see any flaws in Citizendium’s model, and what do you think of Sanger’s decision to critique Wikipedia in what essentially is Citizendium’s sales pitch?

I think Larry’s right on that particular point, and this is a flaw of Wikipedia.  I don’t know if Citizendium (which I haven’t studied in depth) corrects for this or not.

One thing that happens at Wikipedia, particularly on controversial articles, is that the editors get really focused on sentence-by-sentence work on neutrality and factual accuracy.  That’s a great thing.  But what can get lost in the down-and-dirty search for those things is “flow” or what Larry once termed “Brilliant Prose”.

Usually, though, after a period of intense debate resulting in a neutral compromise version of an article that is unfortunately choppy in style, is that some thoughtful good writer who has no stake in the controversy will come in and work gently to make the article more readable.  Such people are the unsung heroes of the information revolution.

In 2007, Wikipedia decided to add no-follow tags to all of its external links. This drew the ire of some and sparked the creation of anti-Wikipedia wordpress plugins that automatically turn all the Wikipedia links on a person’s blog to nofollow.  Has the community’s decision to place no-follow tags around external links kept out spam, and do you think Wikipedia would ever decide to flip the switch back?

I was opposed to the change, and only reluctantly agreed to it after Matt Cutts of Google recommended it.  I am still not sure it is the right answer.  After all, Wikipedia prides itself on public service, and our external links are generally quite carefully vetted.

On the other hand, it is also true than when we were not using ‘nofollow’ we had a bigger problem with skeevy “SEO” experts doing everything they could to get Wikipedia links.  Even today, of course, a link in Wikipedia can drive a significant amount of traffic so we have to deal with inappropriate self-promotion.  But my vague sense is that the troubles have declined.

I don’t know of any pressure within the community to flip the switch back.

Apparently you sat at a long dinner table with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis at Wikimania in 2006, and during this dinner, Calacanis “begged you” (his words) to sell ads on Wikipedia.  He claimed that if you put a leaderboard up, Wikipedia would generate over $100 million a year.  He later offered a more modest revenue proposal, one that involved putting a search box on the Wikipedia.  He estimated this would make $6 million a year, which is ironic considering $6 million is what you raised last year via charitable donations.  Can you ever envision a scenario in which the Wikipedia community would agree to put ads on the site, especially in light of the fact that it met its $6 million donation goal last year?

Actually, I sat next to Jason, but I didn’t know who he was.  Afterwards, when he published his post about the dinner, I didn’t really remember him.  I regret saying so publicly, because this seems to have hurt Jason’s feelings. I was exhausted that evening, and the fault was entirely mine.

The thing is, lots and lots of people propose that Wikipedia should accept ads.  And it is not an unreasonable position.  I am opposed to it, but I am actually a moderate about it.

I think there is a set of circumstances in which the Wikipedia community would accept ads, but we are nowhere near it and I personally hope we never get there.  But, time will tell.

My view is that we should all – not just me, not just the board, not just the current community – but everyone who thinks of themselves as a citizen of the Internet, a citizen of the world – we should all think about Wikipedia as part of the infrastructure of the world, not a competitor in the Internet space, not just a website, but something deeper, cultural, and potentially of value to everyone.

As such, we should think about the long run – not the next quarter, not the next year, not the next 5 years.  What about 50 years?  What about 100 years?  What’s best for the world in the long run?

We desperately need to make sure that everyone on the planet has access to high quality information.  We are on a small and crowded planet that will get more crowded in this century.  We need to live together in peace and productivity.  We need to take individual rights seriously. We need to have political decisions that are rational and fact-based.

We need to have cultural and joy and art and love.

These are heavy responsibilities for us all.  And slapping a “leaderboard” on Wikipedia to bring in short-term revenue might not be the best plan.  (Or it might.  But we need to think like adults about it.)

Regarding your dinner with Calacanis, you wrote on your blog that “there were some very much more interesting people at the dinner.”   Have you and Calacanis patched things up, and do you admire, to some degree, Jason’s ability to get a rise out of people through what some call brilliant performance art?

I have come to admire Jason over time, and I very much regret and apologize for that blog post.

Jason and I are very different people.  He’s competitive, I’m collaborative.  He tries to get a rise out of people on a daily basis (and I hope he doesn’t take offense at that) and I try to be soothing and supportive.  But this means that when I throw someone “under the bus” (his phrase, not mine), it resonates deeply, whereas random statements by Jason don’t have as much impact.  So it’s really bad when I make a mistake like that.

Will it be harder or easier for you to reach a $6 million donation goal in 2009?

Since traffic is growing (according to Comscore) by 4% per month still, I think it will be easier to reach $6 million since we will be 66% larger in terms of reach by next fundraiser as compared to last fundraiser.

On the other hand, I suppose everyone is watching with nervousness about the financial crisis!

You’ve set a tone that Wikipedia has a much deeper responsibility to the world than to act, simply, as a giant encyclopedia.  In what ways do you think Wikipedia will permanently change the fabric of humanity?

Well, if we do our job right, we will be a positive change for the world.  Wikipedia will be a little bit dry, a little bit uncontroversial, but a place where people of all stripes turn for clear explanations and information that allows them to have more difficult debates in a rational and evidence-based manner.

Did you catch this CollegeHumor.com satire of Wikipedia?  Did you find it amusing?

Hilarious!

I’d like to see a roundtable discussion involving you, Andrew Keen, Jason Calacanis, Noam Chomsky, and Ron Paul.  55 minutes into the discussion, a thunderous gong would go off and a mystery guest would emerge and immediately inject himself into the conversation.  As odd as this sounds, I am 100% serious about one day setting this up. There’s no doubt a video of the event would serve as tremendous linkbait–quite an interesting collection of people. Would you participate in this roundtable discussion if your airfare was paid for?

Yes, gladly.  What an interesting set of characters.

You can follow Jimmy Wales on Twitter at @Jimmy_Wales and read his blog at blog.jimmywales.com.

Image credits: William Brawley

¹based on Quantcast numbers

Related posts:

1. Wikipedia is Still Useful for SEO
2. July Comic for Ranked Hard
3. The Battle for Internet City – RankedHard.com comic

However, in this world of Web 2.0, just having a blog isn’t enough. You need to get out there and take part in your online community. You need to comment on other people’s blogs.

Don’t know why? Well, you’re in luck, because here are the top five reasons to comment on other people’s blogs.

Top 5 Reasons to Comment on Blogs: Get Known in the Community

The goal of SEO is getting your site to rank, which happens when the search engines view you as an authority on a subject. Before the search engines can view you as an authority, people need to view you as such. One of the easiest ways to make this happen is by leaving good, meaningful comments on other people’s blogs.

Think about it like this: No matter how good your content is, if the search engines don’t know about it and people don’t know about it, then you’re just writing for yourself. You need to go to the people. Go to a blog that has a large readership and start leaving good comments. This will introduce you to a large readership.

I promise, when you give beneficial comments, people will respond. The owners of the site will get to know you because of your comments, and users will come to enjoy how useful they are. This successfully accomplishes your first task — having the people regard you as an authority on a subject.

Top 5 Reasons to Comment on Blogs: Get Traffic to Your Site

Once people view you as an authority, they will click on your name to inspect your website. (You do put your website in when you comment right? I’m not talking about in the text itself, but associated with your name — you don’t want to look spammy!)

Most blogs have nofollow tags automatically turned on, so the search engine spiders won’t find their way to your site, but that doesn’t stop the people from clicking on the link. Then, once you get people on your site, they’ll see that you really are an authority.

Now you’ve gone from leaving good comments on other people’s blogs, to having their readership checking out your blog — all because you left a comment or three!

Top 5 Reasons to Comment on Blogs: Get Backlinks

While most blogs have nofollow tags on, not all do, so you’ll get some in-bound links right there. However, if you’re only hoping for backlinks from the comments, you’re thinking too small! When webmasters see that you keep leaving good, solid comments, they will check out your site.

After they’ve inspected your site, if they’ve decided they think you’re a solid enough resource, then they might just write a post about you! This will then get you a solid in-bound link that their readership will click on and that the search engine spiders will follow.

And remember those people who were already checking out your blog because of the good comments you left? Yup, they might already be linking to your site. Seriously, get out there and comment already.

Top 5 Reasons to Comment on Blogs: Get New Ideas for Your Blog

When you comment, other people will comment not only on the post, but they can also comment on your comment. This opens up the dialogue to you. It might even spark an idea that you didn’t even realize or consider — an idea for a blog post of your own!

This is why it’s so important for you to take part in your online community! Readership is one of the most valuable aspects of commenting on blogs. Everyone who is commenting has similar interests, but they have different perspectives. And those different perspectives will help your own blogging!

Top 5 Reasons to Comment on Blogs: Get New Subscribers

That’s right, when you comment on other people’s blogs, you might just get new subscribers to your own blog. Think about all of the other reasons to comment. You’ll get known in the community, you’ll get traffic to your site, you’ll get backlinks and you’ll get new ideas for your blog. Put that all together and what do you get?

A stronger better blog for you! And with a stronger, better blog, more people will be interested in what you have to say. When they’re that interested, they’ll subscribe to your blog, which is exactly how this whole online community thing works! The best information is rewarded by other people finding it, and when more people find it, the search engines take notice — and when the search engines take notice? You guessed it, then you’re going to start ranking higher.

Now get out there and start commenting!

Related posts:

1. Akismet Really Stops Comment Spam
2. Committed to Commenting
3. NoFollow No More. SEO Blog Joins the Minority of DoFollow

And while the business networking aspect is great, I’m writing to tell you it can be useful for your SEO efforts too, specifically link building. You may not know this, but LinkedIn does not employ the nofollow attribute on its links, like most other social networking sites. So that means we can use LinkedIn responsibly to build some nice one-way links to our sites and blogs. Even better your employees can use this to build some SEO-friendly links to your company site.

Lets look at the easy steps to do this.

1. Of course the first step is to get a LinkedIn account, if you don’t have one already join today.

2. Go to your profile page and click the link at the top right, “Edit Public Profile Settings”.

3. You can edit “Your Public Profile URL” and choose either your name or your company name. I used my name. Company owners may be better off using the company name for branding purposes. Some of you more SEO-minded people can use keywords in your URL, but I don’t believe spamming your url with keywords is the best option. When you have decided, set the address.

4.Choose “Full View recommended” as your option so search engines can see your links.

5. Be sure to check the “Websites” check box so they are showing on your public profile. You don’t want to hide from the search engine spiders. If you don’t have any sites, go add them (see step 6)

6. Add your websites, if you haven’t already. Be sure to use descriptive keywords in your link text. LinkedIn will give you the default text of “My Website” and “My Blog”, but I’m betting you can do better. I used SEO Company and SEO Blog. And try use all three website options, deep link to one site if you don’t have three sites. Be sure to choose “Other” when editing the website or you can’t enter your custom text.

7. To make these links have more authority, you will need to link to your public profile page. Put it on your own site, on your blog, in your comments on other blogs and so forth. Oh, and of course make connections with LinkedIn.Tthat is why you joined, right?

You have just created up to three one-way links on a high-ranking, high-authority site…for free.

Feel free to request a connection with me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/shellharris. My email is shell [@] bigoakinc.com.

Related posts:

1. Link Building & Comics
2. Squidoo for Traffic – Link Building
3. Link Building – All Links Are Not Equal

For the past few days, many people who create new Squidoo lenses have been met with an unpleasant surprise. All the links on the lenses have been turned to nofollow, as demonstrated in the screen shot on the right. Apparently, this is a bug that popped up after Squidoo changed servers. The lenses are jammed in WIP mode, and in this mode, all links (including internal Squidoo links) are nofollow. It normally only takes the daily lensrank update to break free from this mode and, in turn, have all the links transformed to dofollow. The bug can be traced all the way back to April 9th, so it seems a bit funny that it still hasn’t been resolved.

Hopefully, this bug isn’t a preview of things to come. Most people would flip if Squidoo actually added nofollow tags. Although, Jason Calacanis might be pleased since he views Squidoo as nothing more than an outlet for spammers.

We’ll have to keep an eye on this one. It seems like a long time for a bug to still be acting up.

Related posts:

1. Squidoo for Traffic – Link Building
2. How to Build Links with Flickr – SEO Tip Week 33
3. Late SEO Tip This Week

So the days of parsing links onto high PageRank Flickr pages are over. Or are they? No. Let’s examine why in list form. Let’s examine how you can use the remaining scraps of link juice from Flickr in your SEO campaigns.

1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits.

2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank.

3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow.

Many Flickr personal profile and group pages gain toolbar PR just by having the link spread around in-house, so it’s not that hard to make those pages accumulate PR. Google seems to be very generous in that regard. There’s a lot of PR to be passed around through Flickr apparently.

So, the glory days of Flickr SEO may be over (unless Yahoo does the improbable and flips the switch back), but Rome didn’t burn to rubble in a day, so we might as well make the most of Flickr before it completely collapses.

Related posts:

1. Flickr is Turning into Spam Central
2. How to Build Links with Flickr – SEO Tip Week 33
3. Nofollow Helps Internal Linking and Conversions – SEO Tip 51

A few months ago I wrote an SEO tip explaining why you don’t want to use ‘click here’ for SEO, but we also know conversion rates increase when visitors are instructed to ‘click here’, ‘read more’, ‘buy now’ and so on. What is an SEO company to do?

How can search engine optimization and good user experience coexist? Both are important to the success of your website, but at times they seem at odds with each other. The solution is very simple, if not well known. Use the “nofollow” tag on the ‘click here’ links and make sure you also have a descriptive link with keyword-rich text available as well.

While the “nofollow” tag was originally set up as a spam fighter, it can be used with surgical precision to increase conversions, without hurting you SEO campaign. (Read more about the uses of nofollow) It helps because it will tell the search engines not to count or follow the link with the nofollow attribute. This means the keyword-rich link, without the nofollow, will be followed, helping the destination page’s link popularity.

How do you use nofollow?
Normal link:
<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html”>Click Here</a>

Adding the nofollow attribute:
<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html” rel=”nofollow”>Click Here</a>

Using it on your site might look like this:
Click here for the best deals on dog treats.

The HTML code would look like this:
<a href=”http://www.bestbullysticks.com” rel=”nofollow”>Click here</a> for the best deals on <a href=”http://www.bestbullysticks.com”>dog treats</a>.

Finally, SEO and Site Usability living in perfect harmony, until we start talking about graphics vs. text.

Related posts:

1. Internal Linking – SEO Tip Week 5
2. Squidoo Struggles with Nofollow bugs
3. Internal Search Lifts Conversions

Nicely done, Akismet. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Of course it does say a lot about the pervasiveness of comment spam today and how active it still remains, sadly. But it is also a confidence builder for using the DoFollow WordPress plugin without the fear of comment spam overrunning your site. Akismet can protect you from comment spam 99% of the time even with 10,000 spam attacks.

Related posts:

1. NoFollow No More. SEO Blog Joins the Minority of DoFollow
2. Top 5 Reasons to Comment on Blogs
3. Flickr is Turning into Spam Central

My SEO Toolkit:

SEOpen
I use this dozens of times everyday for client and competitor sites. Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization. Including google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar. I wouldn’t leave home without it. You will need Firefox, but that shouldn’t be a problem. I can’t imagine an SEO consultant or SEO company not recommending Firefox over every other browser.

Keyword Discovery
KeywordDiscovery compiles keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines world wide, to create a very powerful research tool. It has a free trial, but it is well worth the money to get full access.

WebPosition Gold
Web Position Gold offers a nice set of tools that we use for monitoring search results. I know it does much more than this, but we do most things manually around here. I like the way it displays the search results online for our clients to see anytime they like.

WordPress Blogging Software
All of our clients, and this blog, run WordPress. It is the BEST software for blogging in my opinion. The ablibity to add funtionality through plugins will always be the deciding factor, especially with so many plugins being created to support our SEO efforts.

SEO for Firefox
Want to know why Google or Yahoo! ranks pages? SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results. You can turn it off and on easily.

Google Toolbar for Firefox
Do I really need to explain this one? Google search in your browser with lots of helpful toos, especially for on-page optimization.

SearchStatus
Add-on for Firefox that displays the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyzer, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools.

Google Webmaster Central
Be sure you have signed up all the sites you manage SEO for. This is very helpful for understanding how Google sees your website.

Yahoo! Site Explorer
I mentioned Site Explorer in an earlier post, Research Your Competition with Yahoo Site Explorer but it bears repeating, this tool is indispensable in my daily routine. Fortunately, SEOpen (see above) access most of the features for Site Explorer from its menu.

If you have any tools you use, please take time to comment and let me know.

Related posts:

1. Keyword Research Tools – SEO Tip Week 2
2. Graphic Headlines Can Work for SEO – SEO Tip Week 13
3. SEO Tools

- Shell Harris, President, Big Oak

I have decided to turn off the NoFollow attribute to comment posts on my SEO blog. I believe there are enough safe guards to protect this site from spammed comments such as Akismet.

In fact, Akismet it has caught every spam comment so far. And there have been 656 thousands of spam comments in the two many months since this blog was moved to its current location. Obviously, the NoFollow tag was having little or no effect on preventing spam.So, rather than penalize the people who actually write a comment worth reading, I have decided to reward any would-be commenters with a little link juice from a trusted site, providing they comment with some thought, that is.

So bring on your comments and enjoy the revolution, let links breathe free and carry weight for all!

If you wish to join the DoFollow revolution, you can download the DoFollow WordPress plugin that will turn off the NoFollow link attribute. Thanks, Kimmo!

Related posts:

1. Akismet Really Stops Comment Spam
2. Most Popular Blog Posts
3. Committed to Commenting