Michael Gray takes Google to task on its seemingly unequivocal acceptance of Wikipedia pages as authoritative sources of info for search queries. Since the giant recently included all the Tour de
France cities in its Street View roster, Gray ran a search for all 37 city keywords (sans accent, American-style) and found that an English Wikipedia entry came up as the first result in a whopping
25. Wikipedia entries actually showed up as at least one of the first ten results for all 37.
What's most intriguing is that 13 of the Wikipedia entries were stubs or non-entries
at all. In fact, for keywords like "Cerilly" and Lavelanet," the stub entries were actually the very first result.
"The standard Google answer when any SEO complains about
Wikipedia SERP dominance is 'Regular users like Wikipedia,'" Gray says. "To the Google engineers who want to stand behind that, I propose the following question 'Do regular users like completely
empty, nearly empty, or almost useless pages?'"
Read the whole story at Graywolf's SEO Blog »