Why is the Wikipedia page for “Search engine optimization” so bad?
And what I intend to do about it.
The first time I edited a Wikipedia article was on December 13th, 2016. Looking at the edit now, it was not good. I had recently read Nazi Literature in the Americas by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño and it bothered me that the article about him, while mentioning his fictional encyclopedia of fictional Nazi writers in the 20th and 21st century, did not refer to the book as either science fiction or speculative fiction.
I know this because my first edit said:
Some of the book could be considered [[science fiction]] or [[speculative fiction]], as it uses the future as a setting.
What troubles me most about this edit is that it did not include a reference. No citation. It has since been removed, probably because it was unsourced and, let’s be honest, without a source it comes across as just my opinion. That, and the edit itself is a little weird. “Some of the book” could be considered science fiction? Some of it? It’s one book. Is it or is it not sci-fi?
Also, why say “science fiction or speculative fiction”? Because I was afraid to take a hard stance? Anyway, I’m glad that edit isn’t there anymore, although I do think Nazi Literature in the Americas could be better described on Bolaño’s page. I might get to that after this.
Had I edited Wikipedia before this moment? Yes. I had done that very new editor move, a move I would never do again: I had edited while not logged in so that my public IP address showed. No, I did not keep records of those edits and I could not tell you exactly what they were, although I’m fairly certain I had previously edited the page of Roberto Bolaño (while not logged in) and some other authors I liked.
At some point over the last 8+ years—during which I’ve only made 1,340 edits, a number that I’m proud of but which is nothing compared to many, or even most, Wikipedia editors—I noticed the problematic state of the article for “Search engine optimization.”
But I didn’t do anything about it until December 11th, 2024, which is when I made my first edit on that page. About 8 years after my terrible Bolaño edit.
The trouble with editing “Search engine optimization”
Let’s begin with what I think is the most obvious place: someone could make the argument that I should not be editing the page for “Search engine optimization” because I am personally a practitioner of “Search engine optimization”.
Wikipedia has very strict rules about “Conflict-of-interest (COI) editing”, which the article about COI editing describes as “editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships.” Does this mean that, because I practice SEO, I cannot edit Wikipedia when it relates to SEO? I’ll answer confidently no, it does not mean that. COI editing is usually when someone is editing a page for an entity they are either being paid by or closely associated with.
Some of the examples given on the COI editing page include:
Microsoft paying a software engineer to edit Wikipedia articles on two competing code standards, OpenDocumentFormat and Microsoft Office Open XML
Scientologists editing Scientology-related pages to be pro-Scientology
The Koch brothers hiring a PR firm to make them sound better on pages related to them.
Wikipedia’s rule is that you should not edit articles about: yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships.
So, what does this mean for the relationship between the Search engine optimization article and me? I’ll argue that it’s okay for three reasons:
The current SEO article is a mess and someone has to edit it
Cleaning it up will not benefit me, either directly or indirectly
SEO is an international industry. My editing of a page about this industry, as long as I maintain neutrality, is no different than a veterinarian editing the page for “dog” or a journalist editing the page for “journalism”. I have a level of expertise that I can offer to this page and I should do that.
But let’s focus on that first point. What is it about the current SEO article that makes it to bad? What is it I saw on there that led me to add this tag, on December 12, 2024:
This article needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (December 2024)
The biggest issue, as I see it—and I left this in my note when I made the addition of that tag—is that this page has failed to keep up with a changing, evolving industry.
Here are a few examples of the badness of the “Search engine optimization” article, in the current state:
In the main “History” section, before the beginning of the (overly long) “Relationship with Google” section, the last sentence reads:
In 2015, it was reported that Google was developing and promoting mobile search as a key feature within future products. In response, many brands began to take a different approach to their Internet marketing strategies.[18]
Why is this an issue? Because 2015 was ten years ago. Are we to believe that nothing of note has happened in ten years?
Well, the “Relationship with Google” section is more recent. What do we have there?
In October 2019, Google announced they would start applying BERT models for English language search queries in the US. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) was another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing, but this time in order to better understand the search queries of their users.[37] In terms of search engine optimization, BERT intended to connect users more easily to relevant content and increase the quality of traffic coming to websites that are ranking in the Search Engine Results Page.
2019. That was five years ago. As I said in the tag I added at the top of the article: Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.
And this is the state of the entire article:
“Getting indexed” (which, yes, should have a better title) is a section that goes no more recent than 2019.
“Preventing crawling” (another questionable section, especially when one considers that getting crawling, which is most often the preferred option, doesn’t get a section) goes no more recent than 2020.
“Increasing prominence” mostly relies on books from 2008, but does reference one article from 2009.
“White hat versus black hat techniques” relies entirely on sources from 2007, aside from one 2014 article. The only black hat anecdote the text includes is BMW in 2006.
This is the state of the entire article. We are pushing almost two decades for much of this.
And ready for the worst part? I’ve already started editing this article. This is after my attempts to clean it up. I’ve made 18 edits over the last month.
Most have been minor: cleaning up grammar and adding inline tags like {{Obsolete source}} and {{Editorializing}}. But yeah, I’ve been trying to edit this thing and it’s still this bad.
So why is it like this?
Here’s the biggest reason I have found: there are a select few people, like me, who seem to desire “Search engine optimization” to be a good article. I won’t name those editors here, not until I get their permission, but they’re doing some good work. But a lot of their good work is reverting edits from spammers, bad actors, and definite violators of the Wikipedia’s COI guidelines.
And this is not a new problem. Scroll through the edit history for this article, and you’ll see many reverted edits, with notes like:
Rm spamlink./Undid revision
Undoing set up for spam links
Reverting spammy link drop masked by a lot of text.
Citespam; no it's not
Reverting spam link drop
Within the last 500 edits made to the page, 137 of them were reversions of previous edits. Which means that at least 137 edits before those reversions were spam, resulting in the reversions. That’s 274/500 edits either being spam or spam cleanup. So over 50% of the edits on this article are not moving it in a positive direction but are simply the addition of spam or the removal of spam.
When you consider the reputation of SEO as a spammy discipline, this isn’t much of a surprise. But it is disappointing.
Oh, and can it get worse? Of course. This page is semi-protected and has been since 2012.
And what reason was given for this page becoming semi-protected in 2012? Two words: Persistent spamming.
Which means that new users and non-logged-in users can’t even edit it. Imagine how spammy this would be if it was one of those pages that anyone could edit.
What’s next for Search engine optimization?
There are a few things I’d like to see happen on this page. And it’s an assignment I’m giving to myself:
More recent sources for information that remains true
Removal of outdated information—or moving it into the “History” section
Information on Google’s loss of market share and rival search engines
Information on the antitrust case against Google
The rise of the AI “search engine”
No, this Substack post that you are reading will not be exclusively dedicated to my journey to get this article better, but I do plan on regularly reporting on my progress in this area. And yes, this is my first Substack post.
Thank you for reading this far, to those of you who did. I’m off to go edit Roberto Bolaño’s article again. This time I’ll use a better source.