Are Wiki's pretty much dead?

Are Wiki's in general dead? This is the question.

Now don't give me that old BS "well not if you use high enough PR links" line, because that is true with ANY link type... ANY.

You judge a property type as a whole and from what I can see, anything but the best wiki's are toxic crap today compared to what they once were.

Thoughts?

Wiki's have already faced 12.21.2012.

It may seems dead, but can't tell without more research ! Cause, just 2 days ago a site that was penguined for a long time and was not in even within 1000s of google - right now sitting in page 11 ! I did a wiki blast to it like 2 weeks ago (5K wiki blast in all usual crap wiki sites that you can see anywhere). Now I won't say it's outstanding, but, yes it's worth having some more test before decide.

Majority of all the back link strategies people use fall on PR0 page which adds no value to your ranking. Those PR0 pages require additional back links as second tier to make it any meaningful. Blog comment works well for these but the updates have kind of made it scammy, you have to have a better idea now. However, the best form of back link now is to write a good article, I mean really good article on hot topic people would want to syndicate and publish on top traffic sites, a lot of webmasters will likely publish your content and link on their site. Guest blog, press release, blogging, private network, moderated comment, good directories are what I find worthy today. SEO is easy today but pricey, a lot of people still find it hard to believe that a $50 will do you nothing unless when you work it yourself.

blackguy81 said:

It may seems dead, but can't tell without more research ! Cause, just 2 days ago a site that was penguined for a long time and was not in even within 1000s of google - right now sitting in page 11 ! I did a wiki blast to it like 2 weeks ago (5K wiki blast in all usual crap wiki sites that you can see anywhere). Now I won't say it's outstanding, but, yes it's worth having some more test before decide.

Click to expand...

Interesting. I think perhaps some testing is in order. How much content were you using inside those wiki's?

from my experience .. wiki is not dead.. the only thing is, it is only good for web 2.0 backlink.. don't do backlink with your main site..
example:

MAIN SITE <-----backlink---- web 2.0 <-----backlink---- wikis

I've never been a fan of wiki sites, although I still use them for tier 2 and tier 3 links. But what I've never liked about them is that the majority of wiki sites no-follow their external links. So even if you're using it to boost up a web2.0's pagerank, it can't help all that much because it's no-followed. It is good for volume and diversity but I wouldn't rely on it as a main tactic.

I still find some wikis useful to my rank and 100% of them happen to be with heavy captcha protection, mods moderation and spam/spun free

i believe Google De-valuates not platforms itself (in this case wiki) but websites storing tons of useless shit and garbage

Yeah. we can use them in our tier 2 and tier 3 backlinks...just to provide a lil amount of link juice, nothing else!

If you use them properly they still do a great job for your tier 1 links. Mix 20x300 words spinned readable articles and instead of random names use a lot of long tail keywords and they will give you some nice juice. If you 2 button spam you won't get such great results.

It's a good question TH - and you'll forgive me if the tone of my answer is a bit abrupt - it's not aimed at you.

No platform type is dead. Article sites are great, WIKI sites are great - even the odd forum profile and a few blog posts are fantastic.

The crap sites go. Article sites were culled after Panda in April 2011. WIKI's were spammed to death with idiotic "10,000 WIKI blasts"
Those that survive, monitor content, check for spam, perhaps have PR (and in quite a few cases are also D0follow) are great.

Google doesn't give a FLYING F^%K whether a site is wordpress.com, tumblr, blog, WIKI, article or "aunty nellies homemade cooking site"
If the content on it is good (it doesn't encourage spam), if it has a decent link profile itself (for PR) if it allows a static URL for user posted content (for tiered linking) and maybe if most of them are D0follow, then it's a good site.

What you might have is a shit linking profile if you are daft enough to order a "10,000 blast" of any specific platform type.
And it's those tools that spammed the living crap out of massive WIKI lists earlier in 2012 that killed off the WIKI boom. Loads of sites dropped in serps, got deindexed or so full of spam that the owners either ditched them or changed platform.

But guess what that means for those that are left?
Go on - do the "logic math" here. Have a guess what the common denominator is for most of the survivors?

That's right it means that, more than likely, they are GOOD SITES. Some are great. The crap has been culled, the spam palaces de-indexed, the ones with thousands of OBL's have felt the cold wrath of the Penguin, SERP positions destroyed etc.
Just like the article cull of 2011 - the WIKI cull of 2012 has left [in general] JUST THE GOOD SITES - ones that are harder to get links from, but if and when you DO get links they are worth far more.

Platform variation is as important in linking as anchor text variation

i.e

50 wikis
50 articles
50 WEB2.0
50 forums
50 blog posts
50 other random crap

= A great linking profile

300 WIKI sites and little else

= A shit linking profile

It would be nice if people would stop blaming "platforms" for their own lazy assed linking habits. Buying a "spam one platform type" tool and letting the f^%$r create a gazillion cookie cutter links doesn't work too well these days, but every type of site that fulfills the criteria (PR, static URL for link, mostly d0follow, allow content for context, nice if they allow more than one submission per account) above is a great place to link to as long as the overall linking profile of your site is diverse enough.

When people talk shite about "forum profiles are bad" or "blog comments give you negative SEO" I literally would like to reach into my screen and start knocking some sense around (and, as the few of you who know me know - at 21 stone (just under 300 lbs) and with less fat on me than a butchers pencil - it would probably result in some serious damage being done if I did - though mostly to my lovelyt monitor - so I think I'll leave that out )

Put it another way. If articles are out, if WIKI's are out, then whatever the next "site de jour" is - that will be spammed to high hell inside 12 weeks and be out as well, so you might as well save your effort and not even bother OR understand that there is no such thing as a bad site to link from - but spamming the same site type over and over again will give you a bad linking profile for sure.

Scritty

I'll put the question this way then... do you think that the top X wiki sites are more over spammed (or more poorly spammed) than the top X article sites? Because I do believe this to be true, especially due to what you mentioned: the 10k fiverr blasts that went on (and still do actually). I know few people stupid enough to slam 10,000 article or web 2.0 links, but for whatever dumb reason, folks do that to wiki's. So my question is, in that light do you think that there is at least more heat on wiki's?

I am reading more and more people saying 'blog commenting is dead', 'article submission is dead', 'wiki is dead' and whatsoever. I agree with Scritty. I think you just really need to mix them up and diversify your backlinks, mix of follow / no-follow, mix of different platforms, mix of different PRs.

I think it still make effect.
But recommend you use it with tier 2 or 3
Don't use it point directly to money sites or you will increase chance to be in sandbox.

Regards

ThopHayt said:

I'll put the question this way then... do you think that the top X wiki sites are more over spammed (or more poorly spammed) than the top X article sites? Because I do believe this to be true, especially due to what you mentioned: the 10k fiverr blasts that went on (and still do actually). I know few people stupid enough to slam 10,000 article or web 2.0 links, but for whatever dumb reason, folks do that to wiki's. So my question is, in that light do you think that there is at least more heat on wiki's?

Click to expand...

No.

I don't think Google cares what platform a site is. If they rank it high and give it high PR...then they like it.
It's link profiles with thousands of the same site platfrorm in they don't like.


Scritty

Great explanation there Scritty! I am totally agree with you. +rep for you!

There is no such thing as bad or obsolete links. Diversify your backlinks, use it properly and stop being lazy.

Cheers!

Scritty said:

No.

I don't think Google cares what platform a site is. If they rank it high and give it high PR...then they like it.
It's link profiles with thousands of the same site platfrorm in they don't like.


Scritty

Click to expand...

No, no... you misunderstand my question: Do you think that because PEOPLE abuse a platform more (the way more wiki sites get 10k blasts than articles) it has caused more wiki sites to get downgraded as a result? Just like you said... if people fill a site with garbage it ruins it. I'm thinking that because wiki's had a target on their back that a great deal of them have been absolutely DESTROYED with spammy crap by people that bought a $99 wiki tools and unloaded 100's of thousands of poorly spun links. So it's not that Google "hates" wiki's, but that wiki's tend to get over-spammed as a whole. Which still equates to the same end, that if on average, wiki's CAN be dangerous if you don't be careful about which ones you post to.

And of course the next question would be HOW do we figure out which ones are still good????

Don't agree at all. I find wikis pretty powerful and link directly to my money sites with good results.

@ TH,

I do misunderstand. Pretty much

WIKI blasts are dead - they never were a thing that was going to last anyway. "BLASTS" of any one platform type have been SEO suicide since Panda.
WIKI links are not dead, they are 100% as good as any other link type.
Google doesn't go to a site and go "Ah, it's built on a wiki platform - so fuck that then - it's shit - the site, it's inbound and outbound links...they are all shit - we're not even going to bother looking at it. WIKI = Shit...end of"

That just doesn't happen.

Google DOES NOT CARE ABOUT PLATFORM EXCEPT FOR LINK DIVERSITY!

A bad site is a bad site - many wiki sites were just open door spam palaces. Those individual sites were demonted, slapped, deindexed on a site by site basis NOT becasue there was some general rule about them being WIKI but explicitly becasue they allowed themselves to be abused by the webmasters as spam repositories for others. They had zero anti spam protection and an open door "put your crap content and shitty links here" policy. THAT'S what got them penalised - that they were on open source WIKI platforms had ZERO effect on it.

The fact that 10 months ago there were 3 or 4 explicit WIKI spamming tools for sale here on this very forum shows how hard the apmming was early in 2012.
The penalties were Penguin based for the most part and done site by site. This is evidenced by the fact the good ones - the ones that didn't allow spam are still there and ranking well. My lists have about 100 WIKI sites with PR and ranking page 1 for some pretty commercial terms . Moin moin, Tikkiawikki, Media wiki (the most heavily abused) etc - all still there, all ranking very well, most with PR.

Look at it another way. Imagine the crazy world where a site WAS penalized just for the webmasters choice of content management system.

If this was the case then,
Wordpress.org (self host) sites - which have been spammed spammed 10x longer and 10x harder than WIKI "120,000 Scrapebox blast stylee" - would have died YEARS AGO.
Forums (Php, SMF etc) would have been taken up a dark alley and "fucked seven ways till Christmas" by the literally TRILLIONS of Xrumer link spam
Blogger sites would be face down in a pool of their own blood
Wordpress.com would be in junkie rehab talking about the "good old days"
Facebook and Twitter would be shivering in a corner waiting for the axe to come and deindex their ass any day now.

But this isn't happening. Wordpress sites (easily the heaviest spammed) are flourishing and tens of millions of them are riding high in SERPs all over the place.
Conversely - just as with crap WIKI sites - tens of millions more have been slapped, penalized and de-indexed for becoming spam palaces

All done on on a site by site appraisal with ZERO weight given to the platform - just the content and profile.

Stop getting hung up on platform. Link by link the search engines don't give a fuck about what platform a site is on. They never have.
The only thing that matters is your link profile - and "Blast" linking to ANY ONE PLATFORM TYPE is SEO suicide

Google reads the internet index "site by site" not "platform by platform". On an individual level the platform a site is on has ZERO effect on it's ability to rank and the ability of outbound links from it to promote other sites.

Shit like "WIKI is dead" and "Articles are dead" are pretty thoughtless comments.
SHIT WIKI's (which 8 months ago was most of them) are dead
SHIT ARTICLE SITES (which until Panda culled them was most of them) are dead

The good ones (and there are still hundreds) are doing better than ever for the most part.

And why were people so keen in February 2012 to place 10,000 links on 12 week old sites with no authority and no PR anyway?
What fucking good did they think that was going to do them?
At the time I was thinking "Bloody sheep - look at them - for these drongos it's all about BIG NUMBERS" "15,000 Link Blast - gotta have it baaaaa baaaaa"
That 14,990 of them were 3 month old sites already full of shit, with no PR, no authority, no serps and clearly about to get slapped didn't seem to bother these air heads "Baaa baaa"
At the end Google looked at the individual WIKI sites themselves - saw the ton of totally shite outbound links surrounded by unreadable plagirised content - and put a black hood over their head and shot them. FOR BEING SHIT - NOT FOR BEING WIKI

Then they look at the sites that had 10,000 wiki links and just about fuck all else and made the very obvious assumption that "This is self promotion 100% - no natural linking lanscape is made up of 10,000 links from WIKI's" - and shot those as well (this being the ONLY time google took the platform into account - to check platform diversity of inbound links as I said right at the top

I suppose the simple thing here is think before you link and don't be a sheep. IF somone is offering "X thousand" links of the same type - you probably shouldn't do it (Baaaaa Baaaaaa)

Scritty - that was an eye opening post. Rep&thanks. Lots of common sense in it but never thought about it that way.