A massive study by Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting explores whether Wikipedia's recent traffic drop was caused by a ranking drop and whether Google properties gained as a result. Read the complete study and full results at stonet.co/wikipediaserp

1. BY ERIC ENGE ❖ STONETEMPLE.COM

2. July 2015
Wikipedia reports
traffic loss from
Google search.

3. OUR QUESTIONS:
1. How often does wikipedia appear on Google page
1 and at what positions?
2. Does Wikipedia still do well in Google serps?
3. For what types of queries does wikipedia perform
Best?
4. Does Google favor its own properties over
wikipedia?

4. DATA SETS
• Moz: 165K commercial queries
• Stone Temple:182K info queries (sampled in April,
Mayand August)

5. 1. WIKIPEDIA PERFORMANCE
IN GOOGLE SERPS

7. Note that it appears Wikipedia
shows more for commercial
than info queries

8. 2. HOW MANY QUERIES
SHOW WIKIPEDIA IN
GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS?

10. 3. HOW HIGH DO WIKIPEDIA
PAGES RANK ON GOOGLE?

12. Note gap at positions1 and 2
between April & August data.
That's when wikipedia’s
Google traffic fell.

13. 4. HOW DID GOOGLE URLS DO
IN COMPARISON TO
WIKIPEDIA?

15. Google properties do well
in our query sets,
but not quite as well
as wikipedia,even now

16. Note that Google does better
with info queries than commercial,
the opposite of Wikipedia

17. 5. HOW DO DIFFERENT GOOGLE
PROPERTIES PERFORM
IN THE SERPS?

19. SUMMARY
• Wikipedia did slip some in rankings
• Wikipedia performs better for commercial than info
queries
• Wikipedia shows for more queries than do google
properties
• Google properties perform better for info than
commercial queries

21. A prominent SEO and digital marketing industry thought
leader, Eric has been an entrepreneur for most of his
30+ year career. He is the lead author of the book The
Art of SEO; a columnist and contributor to publications
such as Search Engine Land, Moz, Forbes, Copyblogger,
Marketing Land, and Social Media Today; and a regular
speaker at industry conferences such as Search
Marketing Expo, Pubcon, ClickZ Live, and many others.
Eric is known for the publication of groundbreaking
studies, and interviews of other industry notables such
as Google’s Gary Illyes, Matt Cutts, and Bing’s Duane
Forrester.