One of the big issues on the internet last week was when a report said that organic search traffic of Wikipedia from Google dropped as much as 11% since May to July this year. This is a huge loss for the site that approximately lost for about 250 million visits each month. SimiliarWeb, a traffic measurement company, is the first source who reported the news.
The report made the head SEO of SimiliarWeb to speculate on what makes Wikipedia slowly not getting usual search traffic from Google. SEO webmasters used to acknowledge Wikipedia’s page as one of the tough opponents to beat for most of keywords that they aim to top. Even there are many Wikipedia’s pages of companies or brands that rank higher than the actual website of companies or brands.
One of the possibilities Roy Hinkis of SimiliarWeb thought is that maybe Google has adjusted its algorithm to give a huge boost on search ranking to companies or brands websites instead of Wikipedia’s page. But Business Insider revealed a possibility that this could be happening not because Google change its search algorithm. The traffic loss of Wikipedia from Google could be because now the search engine can provide more immediate answers on its search result page to queries, making searchers do not need to go to Wikipedia’s page to find the answer that they looking for.
The business website said that this is one of the new features from Google that it now can insert its own content above anything in search result page, even when the sites that are below the content can give better or detailed answer. Google aims that it want to give to its users the best and the quickest answer as possible. Searchers that used to go to Wikipedia’s page to know the answer that they looking for are now can easily find it on Google’s search result page.
If that’s the reason for the loss then Wikipedia could not be the only site that experienced search traffic loss with how Google ranks it own content. The latest study from Harvard researchers found out that Google is ranking its own site way better in quality result of organic search. This can be seeing clearly on local searches, with sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp getting significant impact of it. There is still no accurate answer to why Wikipedia experienced loss 11% of search traffic from Google, with only three months of date, soon enough the right answers will be revealed when this trend is still happening.
