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What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a company wikipedia page?
Hello! Thanks for asking Wonder about the advantages and disadvantages of having a Wikipedia page for a specialized insurance company using case studies.
Unfortunately, I could not find many case studies on the subject past 2012 however there is an example of dilapidation on the Garfield Wikipedia. As well I have found a lot of information surrounding the benefits and drawbacks of having a Wikipedia page as a company from sources such as Forbes, Inc, and Wikipedia themselves.
METHODOLOGY
Research began through searching for articles referring to specific case studies of this very subject and after an exhaustive attempt one was found that did indeed study this very thing on a Garfield page, but yielded very little in the way of company usage of Wikipedia pages. After this I attempted to search for research done on the SEO involving companies. This yielded promising results and seems to be a well-documented phenomenon with many articles extensively underlying the benefits and drawbacks of maintaining a Wikipedia page.
I will first address the disadvantages of having a Wikipedia page for a specialized insurance company and then subsequently address the advantages.
DISADVANTAGES
Wikipedia has stated directly that their site is not intended to be for first person accounts, meaning they do not expect the subject of a page to be referring to themselves for it leads to a conflict of interest. They have said it is meant to be tertiary source of information about an already known subject, and thusly have made their links “non-follow”. Non-follow is just a fancy way of saying that clicking on a link on a Wikipedia page is not supposed to increase your site’s search suggestibility. While this may seem to render all benefits null, I will readdress the subject in the “advantages” section below.
It should also be mentioned that because outbound links (links that leave Wikipedia) don’t provide SEO Wikipedia branding for a business is only useful when links from Wikipedia lead to other Wikipedia pages. This meaning that having a lot of links to your company page on other Wikipedia pages is really the only way to gain any recognition from Wikipedia, insinuating it can be very unhelpful to small or growing businesses.
In the case study of the Garfield page, in which the page became the center of an information war, many different editors were battling over the gender of Garfield causing confusion for its readers. Research discussed by Forbes also points toward the fact that having a Wikipedia page also may require upkeep on the part of the company, for if they make their own page they must make sure everything is always up to date and no tampering has occurred.
ADVANTAGES
While it may sound bleak, there are some certain advantages to obtaining a Wikipedia page. For instance, if your company creates a plethora of notable products of which can link back to your company Wikipedia page, it can be a very useful source of traffic. This is however intra-Wikipedia traffic, meaning the products will need to be found linked by other pages which will then lead people back to your site. There is a similar example of a specialized insurance industry Pro Sight Specialty Insurance, who averages 422 Wikipedia page visits monthly, this may prove promising for your specific company’s performance on Wikipedia. It also should be mentioned as a closer that, even while Google has agreed to place non-follow status on Wikipedia's outbound links, some anecdotal company evidence says that this simply isn't true and believe there is some positive impact to search results from outbound Wikipedia links.
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up the advantages of having a Wikipedia page are there if the effort is worth it and the products are popular on other Wikipedia pages, but if this is simply not worth it or if you believe resources could be better allocated to SEO then maybe a Wikipedia page is not for your company. Thanks for using Wonder! Please let us know if we can help with anything else!