At the beginning of December of last year, it seemed as though the close friendship between Google and Wikipedia saw their first fissures. A few weeks ago, a number of different (and mostly strongly contested) keywords saw their Wikipedia content strongly decreased in the SERPs – Marcus wrote something about this on Linkvendor at the time. Last week I was able to see that Google has obviously readjusted their position in this matter. An exemplary keyword where this can be seen nicely is “Tagesgeld” (money at call):


A multitude of other keywords show a very similar progression: At the start of December they went down and now they went up again to their old positions. I looked through the list of these keywords – they all have in common that they are usually single keywords with a lot of traffic and a commercial background. Other examples would be “apotheke” (pharmacy), “fliesen” (tiles) or “arbeitszeugnis”(job reference).

Google has already confirmed that Wikipedias great rankings are not Godalgorithm-given but that they are getting a little manual help. Even though I have no knowledge about the background of this move, I do think it is interesting for two reasons.

On the one hand, Aaron Wall showed last week in a Seobook.com posting that in the USA, strong (offline)-brands are ranking extremely well for keywords that are similar to those above. In reaction to this, Matt Cutts announced that they have made a few changes to the algorithm for very few, but apparently high-traffic keywords which gives a higher priority to things like “trust”. At the moment, I am not (yet) able to observe the same trend in Germany but maybe the Wikipedia-story is a harbinger of this.

On the other hand I can imagine that Google ran a – admittedly rather extensive – test on user satisfaction. The possible influences of the users conduct on the SERPs was also a subject in the Ranking-factor-session of last weekends SEO-Campixx, which was actually very well done, that Stefan, Mediadonis and I did – maybe this is such an influence. I could imagine this to be correct seeing how some of the keywords that Wikipedia dropped in sharply have not returned to their old positions.