Wikipedia Backlinks – What You Should Know

Are Wikipedia backlinks really worth the effort and the money? Should you buy Wikipedia backlinks if you have the chance? Do Wikipedia backlinks help with SEO? We’ll answer all of these questions and more in today’s article.

SEO Wikipedia Backlinks – What You Should Know

1. Do Wikipedia backlinks help SEO?

If you are wondering whether Wikipedia backlinks carry any link juice at all, we’ll burst your bubble by telling you that they are no-follow. Therefore, they don’t offer any additional value in terms of your DR, but they do improve your signals when it comes to your website ranking. 

Besides, no one said that you aren’t going to be able to get decent traffic from a Wikipedia backlink, especially if the page you are modifying is one of the more popular ones. 

2. They can increase your site’s authority

Although they are no-follow, Wikipedia backlinks are among the highest quality ones you could ever get. They are valuable when it comes to improving your site’s authority since the latter is determined both by the number of links that point into its direction, but also their quality. 

3. They usually attract more links

If you do end up getting a Wikipedia backlink, the chance of you getting more from other websites that will use your post and cite it as a resource is very, very high. Sometimes, content creators don’t tend to waste a lot of time looking for resources, and if they have to resort to this practice, they’ll simply rely on the resources showcased on a Wikipedia page. 

So whether do-follow or no-follow, you’ll create endless linking opportunities if you get the right Wikipedia backlink. 

How to get backlinks from Wikipedia

1. Discover dead links, recreate the content, replace the dead link

There are three major methods you can use to get backlinks from Wikipedia, and we’ll discuss them all below. 

One of the easiest ways of discovering dead links is to use the Wikipedia Dead External Links Page. This is basically a collection of all of the pages that have to be edited, seeing how they contain dead links. Yes, this method is time-consuming, but it’s failproof.

You can then recreate the content of the dead link (you can use Web Archive to have a look at the content) and even make it better and then replace it using your account. 

2. Discover broken links

This is an excellent link building tactic as it’s pretty clear that if you find a broken link on Wikipedia, it’s probably got hundreds of websites it’s on, and it could be replaced on. With just one broken link on Wikipedia, you can have dozens, if not hundreds, of link building opportunities. 

3. Find backlinks to acquire in Wikipedia using WikiGrabber

WikiGrabber is a tool that you can utilize to find millions of relevant Wikipedia pages that contain broken or dead links. You simply enter the keywords that match your niche, industry, or the topic of the post you want to get a backlink to, and the tool will do its job by creating a list of all Wiki pages that match your query. 

WikiGrabber is very easy to use even by someone who isn’t that tech-savvy, but it might be true that it doesn’t necessarily update in real time. However, it’s one of the easiest ways of discovering dead or broken links. 

4. Adding the links

Once you’ve discovered the link, created a piece of content that perfectly matches, you’ll want to actually add it to the list of resources showcased on the relevant Wikipedia page. But how do you go about things?

Well, first of all, you should create your account and edit an article so as to insert your backlink. Keep in mind that Wikipedia does have a human moderation process put in place, so if you intend on adding poor-quality links or links to posts or pages that have no relevance whatsoever, you’re going to be disappointed as they aren’t going to be approved. 

As a final note, we’d like to suggest that you try out the broken link checker Chrome extension to see whether you can’t find any dead Wikipedia links.  

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Craig Campbell

I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years. In this time I have gained extensive knowledge in the subject of SEO and have build up a wealth of experience in SEO and other digital marketing services.

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