Spam Wikipedia, and you will end up in one of the most dreaded places in the World Wide Web. Imagine a place where your site appears in the 'Spammer Blacklist' and Yahoo! And Google give you the cold shoulder.
This was the tone of things that would happen to anyone who spammed Wikipedia as Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants said during the Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing session at the New York leg of SMX Social Media.
Speaking to Forbes' Andy Greenberg, Jonathan Hochman said: "The blacklist is public, so search engines can read it. You don't want to get on that list."
"Basically it's 'shoot on sight.' You're guilty until proven innocent."
Jonathan also writes in Search Engine Journal that:
"If you only end up on the Wiki blacklist, that might be ignored. If you do a bunch of other shady things, that signal starts to look consistent.
I know some of the people who run the blacklist. Being hardcore geeks, they enjoy watching what happens to the search rankings of the sites they add. Their impression is that being added to the list isn't a good thing for your search marketing campaign. Maybe that's wishful thinking on their part, or maybe not."
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Sounds like Wikipedia’s most active editors and admins are all about vengeance and punishment. Didn’t that that was part of the process of compiling the “sum of human knowledge”. Wikipedia was set up as the encyclopedia “anyone can edit”. Then they began an endless process of systematically prohibiting just about everyone from editing.
Wouldn’t this mess have been easier if they allowed corporate entities to edit within the “rules” of building an encyclopedia? The volunteers got it into their heads, though, that Wikipedia was only for volunteers without jobs, or still in school, or with a ton of free time. That’s how this encyclopedia has become the world’s most irresponsible website.
Sounds great, unless the website you are promoting doesn’t rely on search engine results for its traffic. In fact, a person could theoretically funnel more traffic by consistently spamming Wikipedia then it would have gotten from the search results anyways.