*Regards,Itzik Edri*
Chairperson, Wikimedia Israel
+972-(0)-54-5878078 | http://www.wikimedia.org.il
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Itzik - Wikimedia Israel <itzik(a)wikimedia.org.il>
Date: Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 12:29 PM
Subject: [PRESS] Wikipedia suddenly lost a massive amount of traffic from
Google
To: Communications Committee <wmfcc-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, "A mailing list
for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in
Wikipedia and analytics." <analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
http://www.businessinsider.in/Wikipedia-suddenly-lost-a-massive-amount-of-t…
>From what I see in the ReportCard (http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/), there
is decrease, but far less than mentioned on this article
----
Wikipedia suddenly lost a massive amount of traffic from Google
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales speaks at a press conference ahead of the
London Wikimania conference in 2014.
The amount of traffic that Google sends to Wikipedia has declined by more
than 250 million visits per month, according to SimilarWeb, the traffic
measurement company.
Roy Hinkis, SW's head of SEO, says the downgrade is a genuine mystery:
What I saw shocked me. Wikipedia lost an insane amount of traffic in the
past 3 months. And by insane I mean that the free encyclopedia site lost
more than 250 million desktop visits in just 3 months!
Here are the most recent numbers, in visits, per SimilarWeb:
May: 2.7 billion
July: 2.4 billion
wikipedia
SimilarWeb.com
Hinkis suspects that Google has changed its search algorithm to favour
actual brands and company web sites over the Wikipedia entries that are
about them:
Wikipedia has long since been a huge competitor for brands in terms of
website traffic. SEO's aren't crazy about it, because it takes a huge chunk
of our traffic.
However, what Wikipedia taketh from other sites' traffic, Wikipedia also
giveth: The site is so massive that it also drives a fair amount of traffic
onward to other sites. But the less traffic Wikipedia gets, the less it can
give.
Business Insider asked Google for comment but we have not heard back yet,
so let's speculate.
One of the major trends happening at Google is the company's preference for
inserting its own content above the content of other non-Google web sites,
even when those sites may be better resources than Google itself. Here is
an example. If you're trying to remember who won the World Cup last year,
you might get this Google result:
wikipedia google
Google
If you click on that down-arrow that Google provides for the "roster and
overview," you get a capsule on the German team. That might be all you
need, and Google believes this is so useful it might save you a click.
The problem is that a few months ago that click might have gone to
Wikipedia.
Several information aggregation companies are suffering from this, most
notably Yelp. Yelp has repeatedly and loudly complained that Google's own
promo boxes on the top of search engine results pages are siphoning traffic
from better-quality sites that normally would have come top of the results.
The issue is at the heart of the EU's investigation into whether Google is
abusing its monopoly in Europe to favour its own properties and distort the
market for search traffic on competing sites.
We're not saying that's what is happening to Wikipedia. But it's certainly
an unfortunate coincidence.
*Regards,Itzik Edri*
Chairperson, Wikimedia Israel
+972-(0)-54-5878078 | http://www.wikimedia.org.il
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment!
Hi,
My name is Kobi, and I am doing a small project with the wikipedia
pagecounts statistics.
I wanted to know what is the time zone of the date presented in the title
of each pagecount file.
Kind Regards,
Kobi Perl