What Would it Take to Outrank Wikipedia for SEO?

The first step would be to systematically remove the word "SEO" from the internal anchor text linking to the Wikipedia entry. Get a trusted editor to do it.

Hello Aaron!
First I'll ask Google (and maybe other search engines too) politely to rank Wikipedia automatically not manually ;)
After they reply to my asking with "Are you crazy?!" I'll try to hire an army of SEOs and "regular people" too to make my link campaign for a couple of months/years following all of the rules of the search engines.
If that doesn't help. I'll create another search engine and wait(work hard) to become No.1 search engine then rank my site there.
And yes God have to be involved sometime in that situation.

PS: Hope I'm not hurting anyone with my humor.
Great Site!

Well...to outrank Google for "seo" you'll just have to do everything that they are not.

Which may easily mean being more creative then them and going against the policies they preach.

Some policies they don't preach, but still enforce.
This is the part about divinity and how Google would love to be God.

This is where (somehow) you have to become more useful, as a source of info on SEO, to Google than Google itself.

But I think that you're already well on your way ;-)

How about instead of trying to defeat Wikipedia you do everything you can to make sure they really do rank for everything.

As people begin to realize that every time they go to Google they end up at Wikipedia you teach them how to bookmark Wikipedia and use it's internal search instead. People cut out the middle man and start their search directly at Wikipedia. Google loses traffic and is forced to remove Wikipedia from the index.

Just think organic internal linking. Im trying something along these lines and am going to rel=nofollow all 'ordinary' links like navigation etc and rely on juice being spread through in-content links. The only issue ive found so far is that i anticipate my glossary carrying the most weight whereas i want the product pages to achieve this tho i suspect that it will all rank if done properly. check my framework (in sketch) at www.neue.co.uk/xrio the left hand menu is a sitemap that simply gives me access to content. the content is all being re-writen or created so theres not much there but where there is content (ie news articles) you can see where im going with this.

oh and dont forget to rel=nofollow all external links and get some deep links into your content.

lets see if it works ;)

mark

I think if an SEO blogger nofollowed all of their external links that would cost them far more than it was worth to try as an experiment. ;)

Well, ahem.... I'm guessing the easiest way to knock them off now would be to buy Wikipedia a shed load of paid links, making the directories as bland and inappropriate as possible.

Google would have to penalize them wouldn't they?

Build an amazing authority page and post it on Google Knol! I can see this as something on the horizon, although it may not be what you were looking for!

Soon, we may hear a political exclaim
"We have nothing to Google, than Google itself."

The position is attainable; the methods, however, will not make you any friends.

Know any wiki admins? :)

The other piece you are good enough to handle yourself.

I was looking for some info about Johnnie Walker Blue Label Scotch and Wikipedia outranks the makers of the Whiskey. Is that right?

If you want Wikipedia de-ranked, guide them into becoming a Google competitor, rather than continuing to serve as an underpaid compliment. This is the art of strategy.

I have to agree with vangogh on this one. Google knows the writing is on the wall, as I'm sure many users who are doing research or an educational search are already loading up Wikipedia instead of Google.com. I know I've done it. Google will try to keep these users that are already starting to migrate like rats off a ship (or like myspace users jumping to Facebook) by introducing Knol.

And now that monster is outranking them. Totally agree with VanGogh on this one, and your reply as to the point of Knol, Aaron. My problem with Knol is why would someone bother? Why not just go to Wikipedia? The only difference I see is that I read somewhere knol will be okay with companies editing their own stuff.

I had something more insightful to say but I've forgotten it now.

At the end of the day, if you can look around the top 100 backlinks to Google's page and either duplicate them or buy out the sites and kill the links to Google, it could probably have a significant impact, if we consider the 80-20 rule (here, 20% of the links contributin 80% of the juice). Question is: Are you doing it for pride or for the ROI? If it's the latter, is it cheaper to buy out the competition's links or cheaper to promote yourself offline in such a way that you're the greater authority and deserve the ranking more. NYT, WSJ and such links come to mind, which ought to be attainable for someone with your profile.

Outranking Wikipedia isn't all that difficult, a law firm I work for is doing it right now for "morgan keegan". Keyword density, Page titles, etc are very important but really you need more social bookmarks and backlinks on relevant authority sites than whomever you are competing against.

In this case you would pretty much need external links from SEO "authority" sites with rich anchor text, matching anchor text for several relevant search terms that include "SEO" in them, then of course links with just "SEO" anchor text on them spread across 1000's of social story or related content sites. You would need to make sure all your content passes CopyScape and produce some kind of new content regularly if not daily. Haven't tried it, just seems like a crap load of work.