We’re a fairly small business with about 200,000 visits per month & a Google page rank of 3. We’ve been established about 10 years. We were about to go ahead and submit a Wikipedia article about the company, but then stopped and started to think of some pros and cons:
Pros:
Having presence on Wikipedia might make a company appear more trustworthy & established
Having a link from such a reputable site may help our site’s page range
Cons:
Wikipedia moderators might deem the article not noteworthy and reject it, making the whole discussion moot
Competitors, disgruntled customers & general trolls can freely edit & add to the article (as far as I know, anyway - I’m not too clued up on the details of how Wikipedia works!) and slag us off. As far as I know there’s only so much we can do to combat this
The Wikipedia page may well rank above our own for searches for the company name, which presumably means a good chunk of users will go straight to the Wiki page. Although it could be argued that these users get to see that we are an established and reputable company, there’s also the argument that any barrier to a customer coming to your site is a bad thing
Anyone have any thoughts or opinions on the matter?
Wikipedia is not a promotion tool, so for the reasons that you mentioned - I don’t think you should create a page about yourself. It won’t help your PageRank anyway, because external links on Wikipedia are nofollow.
Here’s the thing about notability
A company, corporation, organization, school, team, religion, group, product, or service is notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in secondary sources. Such sources must be reliable, and independent of the subject.
I agree with brimin. Wikipedia is not a self promotion tool, and no one should want it to be. This is what your website is for. Concentrate on placing good content on your site, make it easy to navigate and useful to visitors. Then go about promoting it in respectful, honest ways like word of mouth, supporting good causes etc. Become better known through good karma.
I’m sorry to say that Wikipedia is an information distribution website. Thus no promotional stuff. It’s an online encyclopedia, free to use. That’s why it’s founder don’t allow ads in Wikipedia. The site gets its funding from donation and the like, though.
If your business hasn’t made news headlines in any of the big 3-letter news networks, chances are that wikipedia editors would take down the page for not fulfilling the noteworthy requirement.
