Can Lawyers Get More Clients From a Wikipedia Page
The question:
Is there much value in a Wikipedia profile nowadays?
My answer:
Wikipedia is a very authoritative website. Google loves Wikipedia. If you can actually get a Wikipedia profile for yourself to stick then that would be great. The challenge is that a lot of times if you haven’t done something significant, your profile is going to get deleted pretty quickly.
Using Wikipedia for backlinks
One of the ways that you can use Wikipedia is for the backlinks. They are nofollow backlinks but nofollow backlinks are still a big part of a backlink profile.
Find an article on Wikipedia that’s related to your practice area and then write a blog post that could serve as a citation for a specific part of that article. Maybe there’s a part in there that’s talking about a specific area of the law.
So you can write a blog post that talks about that area of the law and then you list it as a citation for Wikipedia. That will work sometimes. That’ll get the link to stick and then you have a link from Wikipedia.
One problem with that is that Wikipedia editors and Wikipedia editors take it pretty seriously, even though it’s a volunteer position. They often remove citations that are from what appears to be a law firm’s website or a personal blog from a law firm.
A workaround
Here’s a workaround… When my clients get links from other websites, for example, when you’re mentioned in the local newspaper about a dog bite or something like that, then it links back to your website.
What you can is figure out how you can either add a line to a relevant Wikipedia article, i.e., something about dog bites or about the specific breed of dog. And then link from Wikipedia to the news article or to whatever other website links to your website.
So when the editors look at where the Wikipedia article is linking, it’s going to be a news site, and they’re not going to look at it and think this is someone trying to game the system. But the result is that you’re getting a link to a news site, which is then linking to your website.
Why backlinking works
With backlinking, the sites that link to you make a big difference. But then those sites are impacted by the sites that link to them. So if you can get good links to the sites that are linking to you, your website will benefit and you will rank higher because of that. Those are a couple ways that I would use Wikipedia.
About getting a Wikipedia profile
It’s really hard to get a profile just because of the fact that you’re probably not someone significant. If you’re someone significant, it works, but otherwise, if you’re not someone significant, then it’s very difficult to get them to not delete your Wikipedia profile.
What you should do
There’s one other way to do it: if you find a citation that you can use right on your blog post. You can get a link that way but sometimes that will get deleted as well. So the best thing to do is to get other websites to link to you like news articles and different things like that. And then try to get links to them which will then link to you. That’s what I would do.
