You may have read recently about the companies which have been caught editing articles on Wikipedia which deal with their business. A new site called WikiScanner will trawl through anonymous edits on Wikipedia and match them with corporate IP addresses; whilst not all of these edits will be spam (some may be workers editing pages they have a personal interest in), most are likely to be in breach of Wikipedia’s terms of use.

I finally got round to looking at the site today and what’s really interesting (other than the companies who have been doing this who should know better) is the reason that the site was set-up: the primary reason given is

To improve virgil.gr ’s Google pagerank for the query ‘ virgil ‘

and with this in mind, the site’s creator (Virgil Griffity) requests that all links to the site from articles about it, use the anchor text Virgil. In other words, the whole project is designed as a piece of link bait.

There are a couple of interesting points to consider here. First is the naivety of the site’s creator. Whilst it is always preferable to have inbound links using the anchor text that you are hoping to rank for, expecting people to link using completely irrelevant text is just ridiculous.

The anchor text of the link should, in an ideal world, give a reader a reasonable understanding of what they are likely to find on the linked to page (as I explained in this post on linking for journalists). So linking to a story about a website that tracks Wikipedia edits, with the anchor text Virgil, is not likely to tell the reader anything. And is probably why no serious news sources have respected this request.

The other thing that interests me about the WikiCrawler, is that it seems to prove once again, that usefulness beats beauty when it comes to link bait. The site has only been live for a matter of weeks (as far as I can tell) and in that time it’s managed to generate close to 16,000 links (more than the UNIQLO site I talked about recently had managed in 6 years).

So whilst the creator may have a while longer to wait before he outranks the page about the Roman poet on Wikipedia (what else) when someone searches for Virgil, he’s certainly well on his way to building up a very impressive number of inbound links. Now if only he had asked people to link to his site with a word that was actually relevant…

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