User:SamHolt6/SEO wiki mirrors

SEO Mirrors of Wikipedia

Came across several wikis built using Wikipedia source code. These wikis seem to be intended to improve article subject SEO and possibly generate google knowledge panels for their subjects. One of the mirrors seems to be scrapping content from the Wikipedia draft space and using it to create new articles. The sites are;

Wikitia:About Wikitia (site blacklisted) - charges for articles and for registering as an editor, seems to create its content by copying drafts from the en.wiki draftspace.
Wikidot.com.au
Wikiedata - copy of Wikidata.

All of the linked sites above share the same text on their "about" page, implying they are all connected. My personal analysis is that a company has set up these Wikis in an attempt to improve client's SEO and generate a google knowledge panel for them.

Note

It should be noted that Wikitia and its staff have been blacklisted from Wikipedia for violation the communities trust and engaging in SEO-related activities for clients. Editors affiliated with the site have also been tied (see example) to sockpuppet activity, a violation of Wikipedia's rules. Further information can be found at User:Gobonobo/Wikitia.

Example

An example of the effects of these mirrors can be seen at Masato Honda (see Twitter thread). The article for Masato Honda was drafted by a new Wikipedia editor at Draft:Masato Honda for several months (a Wikidata item had existed since April 2013), during which time the draft's content was retrieved and uploaded to Wikitia on 29 September (note the Wikipedia editor was still working on the draft at this point). This Wikitia article became the first search result on Google and possibly generated a Google knowledge panel for Honda.

After viewing the original editors tweet (see above), I reviewed Draft:Masato Honda (the subject had a Wikipedia article on two non-en language wikis), accepted the draft into the mainspace and documented the effects, which are as follows;

Immediately after the creation (by moving the draft into the mainspace) of the Wikipedia article, no changes were detected on Google (the mirror site remained the first search result and the linked site in the knowledge panel). However, the new Wikipedia article immediately moved to the front of the Bing search results (which does not display the mirror article).
Within ~1 day of creation, a link to a mobile version (en.m.wiki) of the Wikipedia article appeared as the third result in the Google search results, with the mirror still being the first result and the linked site in the knowledge panel.
Within ~2 days of creation, the Wikipedia article (still mobile version) remained the 3rd search result in Google, but had replaced the Wikitia link in the Google knowledge panel. At this point, voice based searches (via Siri and Alexa) started to cite Wikipedia as the source of the information on Honda.

Several hours after the observation above, the Wikipedia article no longer appeared in google search or in the knowledge panel (which reverted back to linking the mirror site). Vocal searches continued to link to the Wikipedia article.

Several hours after the second observation, the Wikipedia article remained absent from a google search but had again become the article linked in the knowledge panel. Note that the knowledge panel now linked to the desktop version of the Wikipedia article (as opposed to the mobile version)

Within ~3 days of creation, the Wikipedia article (now desktop version) again appeared in google search results (now second as opposed to third) and remained the cited information in the knowledge panel. Mirror site remained the first search result.
Within ~6 days of creation, the Wikipedia article had become the first search result in google, with the mirror article being moved to second place. Google knowledge panel remains linked to the Wikipedia article.

Analysis

Several conclusions can be drawn from the Honda example. The issue which brought my attention to this topic (an editor being concerned that their Wikipedia draft was published on Wikitia) is likely to continue (see this example) as Wikitia seems to be properly attributing Wikipedia for the content it publishes. Initial concern that Wikitia's strategy (which seems to be designed around SEO and PR) would affect Wikipedia's search ranking in some way seem to be unfounded; Wikitia's published article on Masato Honda existed online for close to 3 months, but had been displaced by Wikipedia's article on Honda as the first search result on Bing immediately, the linked content in the google knowledge panel within several days, and as the first search result on google within one week of the Wikipedia article being published. The initial instances of Google linking to the mobile version of Wikipedia might be a minor issue, but was resolved within several days and did not effect article accessibility.

A tangential question to the example is what caused Google to generate a knowledge panel for Masato before his Wikipedia article was published. Unfortunately, not much can be gleaned from the example above; Wikitia hints in its marketing it can generate knowledge panels by publishing articles, but this cannot be verified in this case as it is not known if Masato had a knowledge panel prior to the mirror article's creation. However, it can be speculated (on the basis of many Wikitia article subjects - found via a random search - not having knowledge panels) that Google uses Wikidata (which Honda has been present in since 2013) to generate knowledge panels and only uses non-Wikipedia mirrors to populate panels with text, and even then only when no Wikipedia article exists for the subject (see example above regarding Wikipedia's supplanting of Wikitia in the knowledge panel within ~2 days).