Search Engine Journal is reporting that being on the spam blacklist for Wikipedia can hurt your organic search results in Google and Yahoo. The
claims first came from a Wikipedian and Search Marketeer, Jonathan Hochman. To be honest I wasn't so willing to believe that from a Wikipedian. He said:
Quote:
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Wikipedia keeps a ’spammer blacklist’ and shares it with several search engines… Domains that appear on the list often lose valuable search engine traffic.
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However, Matt Cutts has gone back to comment on Search Engine Journal and responded:
Quote:
If you do a search for [wikipedia spam blacklist], the first result is helpful. It gives pointers to various strings and urls that Wikipedia has blacklisted on their site.
I’d characterize that list as much like a spam report: the data can be useful, but at least in Google it wouldn’t automatically result in a penalty (for the reason that site A might be trying to hurt site B).
That could be one of the things jehochman was referring to.
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In my opinion using a Wikipedia spam list is very wrong. Anyone can publicly edit that list within reason and you could get some megalomaniac Wikipedian who is click happy at adding anyone to that spam list.
You can find the Wikipedia spam list here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist
and the original article from Search Engine Journal here:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/w...enalties/5854/