On a recent post, I was asked why I didn’t include wikis as a source of free content for domain development. Wikis have become very popular especially the king of all wikis, Wikipedia. So here is why I do not use wiki content.
Unique content
If you want a website to rank well with the search engines and visitors, you need to offer something different. Unique content helps your web site stand out to your visitors.
When search engines come across content that is duplicated from another source, they prefer to index only one copy or certainly rank one copy much higher in the index.
The reason for this is simple. No one wants a SERP (search engine results page) to be full of the same links to the same content. It doesn’t help the visitor and therefore it doesn’t help the search engine company.
The consequence of this is that it also doesn’t help you
Spam signals
As I have described previously in a leaked Google document, copied or scraped content with ads placed around it is considered a spam web site by the search engines.
Two of the most frequently scraped web sites are Wikipedia and DMOZ. Given the authority and PR of most articles in Wikipedia, their page will rank above your page and yours will be seen as the duplicate and therefore demoted or penalized.
Accuracy
Wikis are generated by users without the true fact checking and care that goes into the content of most encyclopedias. Copying content from wikis without fact checking can just perpetuate and spread errors. This is certainly not a way to build authority with your visitors.
Rewriting
Yes, you can rewrite wiki information but you should take care to check for accuracy and it is always good to add some other information and writing of your own.
The problem I have with rewriting is that it takes about as much effort to come up with my own content which is totally unique.
So for these reasons, I do not use wikis when developing domains.
