Competing Against Wikipedia Help?

I know Wikipedia has a very strong SEO record but I am curious about something.

I was researching a keyword, top results with PR0 amazon pages.
3rd and 4th were Wikipedia pages and after 4th was just random, easy to beat pages. So how hard is amazon to beat out if the exact phrase is not in the title? And if Wikipedia does not contain the exact phrase anywhere on the page, and doesn't mention any of the words in the title or url, then how hard will it be to outrank? The keyword is 3 words long and each word of the phrase is in a different spot on the page.

Thoughts for beating Amazon? Wikipedia?

I'm currently stuck under wikipedia for one of my best keywords. It didn't used to matter, but Google keeps adding new crap to its results pages (like instant) which make its users focus more on the top 3 or 4 results.

I am currently dealing with this situation by slowly knocking out the wikipedia page's internal links. First I check which internal pages are linking in, then rank them by PR.

After this, under different proxies of course, I go in and try to find valid reasons for deleting the internal links. You could try this too, it's a tried and tested method.

As for amazon, I don't like competing with them but on a long tail, I am sure you'll be able to do it. As always, keep building quality links.

Google should do something about how it ranks wikis to prevent the above ^

which is lol btw

I outrank wiki in a few instances. But they're always right below me... just waiting for me to slip up and take my place! But I don't usually encounter them as SERP competition

I make sure to, when I want to outrank wiki, that in addition to solid backlinks (and a wiki backlink or two if I can get it ) that I have more content than the wiki page.

Both Amazon, Wikipedia and other site with low topicality are easy to beat, unless you have low topicality yourself. That means if wikipedia as 100 pages about "blue widgets" we say it has very low topicality rating (100 out of 54 million indexed pages). If your site has 100 pages about "blue widgets" out of 100 indexed pages, you have high topicality and are basically seen as "all about blue widgets". This is something similar to domain trust, but it is always related to particular keyword(s).

On top of that what you want is to score some high quality links, preferably from related sites and have most of your links contain "blue widgets" in the anchor text.

If you manage to be seen by Google as an authority/specialist on blue widget, you will rank above Wikipedia, Amazon or any site with low topicality for that keyword.