The Discovery team does present some high-level data on referrals from external sources, including search engines. [0] [1]
Select weekly or monthly under "Smoothing" to make it easier to see longer trends. As Dan said, I'm not aware of anyone within the foundation targeting optimizing search engine presence. I know there are a few smaller initiatives - like adding open graph meta descriptions, lazy loading sections/images on mobile (impacts page loading speed), and moving javascript to the footer a few years back. There's also an SEO tag in Phabricator, which folks can use to indicate tasks are related to improving bits of code along these lines. [2] [0] http://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/ [1] http://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/#traffic_by_engine [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/1163/ Yours, Chris Koerner Community Liaison - Discovery Wikimedia Foundation P.S. Confession time. I use to do web development and SEO stuff was part of the job. I also still know some folks who work in this world. :) On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 6:49 PM, Justin Ormont <[email protected]> wrote: > Search Engine Land has a Sept 2015 article on the topic of reduced ranking > of Wikipedia: > http://searchengineland.com/study-despite-wikipedias- > visibility-decline-in-google-it-still-shows-up-more-often- > than-google-properties-231277 > > This is based on a short study by Stone Temple: > https://www.stonetemple.com/google-still-loves-wikipedia- > more-than-its-own-properties/ > > My thoughts: > Some of the traffic to WMF will be replaced by different interaction > methods of asking questions, eg: "ok google, what is the capital of france > => "The capital of Francis is Paris"; and by direct answers on the SERP, > eg: "who is mark twain"[1] returns a direct answer at the top, referencing > biography.com, along with an knowledge pane on the right sourced from > Wikipedia and likely other mixed sources. > > I think having traffic replaced by direct answers is still a good thing as > it fits within the mission[2] and vision[3] of WMF of disseminating > knowledge. The primary downside I see is the shallowness of the knowledge > presented; the quick answer lacks the discovery aspect of going to a full > wiki article and becoming lost delving numerous links deep. > > -- > > [1] https://google.com/search?q=who+is+mark+twain > [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement > [3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision > > Thanks, > --justin > > On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Pine W <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi Discovery, >> >> Over the past few years, my anecdotal impression is that search results >> from Wikipedia have become less and less prominent when I use major web >> search engines. >> >> I'm aware that Discovery is working on internal search features including >> cross-project search, and that WMF people working on readership are trying >> to increase the dwell time and number of pages that Wikipedia visitors >> spend on Wikipedia. Has anyone analyzed trends for web search engine >> rankings of Wikipedia articles, particularly over the last few years? Also, >> is anyone analyzing what would be required to increase the rankings of >> Wikipedia articles (and information from sister sites, such as Wikisource >> and Commons) when people use web search engines? >> >> Thanks, >> >> Pine >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> discovery mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > discovery mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery > >
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