How to Generate Valuable Wikipedia Backlinks

Boost Your Organic Traffic With Powerful Backlinks From Wikipedia

With an average of 1.4 billion visitors a month, Wikipedia is consistently one of the world’s most visited websites. In fact, it’s the fourteenth most popular website in the world. Generating Wikipedia backlinks can be an excellent way of driving more targeted traffic to your site. 

‍Technically all you have to do is insert your own links into Wikipedia pages. However, your site must prove itself when it comes to its authority and relevance on the given topic.

Although anyone can edit Wikipedia, any newly added content or backlinks must be given the all-clear from Wikipedia’s moderators.

Why Are Wikipedia Backlinks So Valuable? 

With a Moz Domain Authority score of 100, it’s safe to say Wikipedia is considered a highly authoritative and trustworthy source. Google rewards these kinds of sites with high performances in rankings. 

As we know the most valuable backlinks come from sites that Google considers to be authoritative. Wikipedia links are also carefully moderated by humans which Google also likes. 

Wikipedia pops up in search results for most terms so having it link to your site can do wonders for boosting your rankings effectively. 

A few solid Wikipedia backlinks will drive highly relevant organic traffic to your web page. 

Seeing as Wikipedia is focused on bringing high-quality information on specific search terms to readers, this means a highly targeted and focused group of readers have the chance to click on your link from Wikipedia. 

There’s also the added bonus that if your site is linked to from a Wikipedia page, it might generate links from other websites who want to use your site as a reference. 

Wikipedia doesn’t just act as a valuable backlink source but also as a way of generating other backlinks. 

Building backlinks from Wikipedia is a massive vote of confidence in your content’s authoritativeness and comprehensiveness. 

How to Generate Wikipedia Backlinks

Building Wikipedia backlinks is surprisingly simple if you know which opportunities to look for. 

Broken/Dead Links

Dead links are those that are no longer active. In other words, they don’t lead the page visitor to any useful content. In the past, these links would have had content on the other side. 

Dead links show Wikipedia moderators that they need to be fixed and updated. 

Since Wikipedia is such a vast website, loads of the links are dead and it’s pretty hard for the moderators to keep track of all of them. 

So to make life both easier for moderators and to take advantage of positioning your content on a Wikipedia page, you can give moderators the content they need to replace the broken link with something relevant. 

You can also edit Wikipedia pages directly. If you see a broken link that needs replacing and is directly relevant to your content you can go in and edit it there. Beware though that moderators will check your links so anything that looks suspicious will be a red flag to them. 

It’s also worth considering that any broken links on Wikipedia are likely to be broken elsewhere across the web. You can use this to your advantage and go around hunting for more link building opportunities that extend far beyond Wikipedia. 

If you implement this approach for just a few of your web pages, you’ll soon see the opportunities for building authoritative and valuable backlinks grow exponentially. 

But how do you find these broken links and possible backlink opportunities? 

WikiGrabber 

WikiGrabber is an ultra-powerful tool for uncovering backlink opportunities in Wikipedia. 

To use the tool, enter a search term related to your content, hit enter and the platform will return with a list of all the related pages on Wikipedia that require a reference or have a dead link that needs replacing. 

You can use the filtering system to view dead links or pages that require citations. 

Google Advanced Search 

There’s also a handy Google trick you can incorporate to find dead links across Wikipedia too. 

Go to Google and using an advanced search query uncover all the dead links related to your chosen search term. 

site:wikipedia.org “search term” “dead link” 

Google will then pull up lots of Wikipedia pages with deadlinks related to your search term. 

You then need to hit ctrl+f to locate the dead link. 

What to Do With the Broken/Dead Link 

Once you’ve identified and located a couple of the broken links, you need to copy the URL and paste it into the Wayback Machine tool. This tool conveniently shows you what the page looked like before it was taken down. 

You can then take a look and decide whether this content is related to your site.

If you decide that there’s enough common ground, you can find content you’ve already created which could fill this gap or create some fresh content which fits with what the Wikipedia page requires from this link. 

Or you could rewrite the content that shows up on the Wayback machine to make it more relevant and useful to your target audience. 

How to Use a Broken/Dead Wikipedia Link to Uncover More Backlink Building Opportunities 

Once you’ve identified a dead link on Wikipedia you can use it to find more backlinks pointing to it that you could replace with your own content. 

Paste the deadlink into a backlink checker like Ahrefs or SEMrush to uncover all of the different backlinks pointing to it. 

The more backlinks that point to it the better since it means it’s a topic that people want to link to. 

If there are lots of backlinks, this provides you with the opportunity of writing to lots of different webmasters to improve your chances of placing some of your content in the position of the old dead link. 

Lots of backlinks generally mean it’s worth putting in some time to create the perfect piece of content to fill the gap. 

Create a brand new web page or update pre-existing content. Cover all your bases so that it’s a piece of content that Wikipedia would want to link to. 

You can use tools like Buzzstream to help you find the contact details of the webmasters as well as create customisable email templates to send out requesting backlinks to your site. 

Add Your Own External Links to Wikipedia 

When looking for dead links you may find pages on Wikipedia that are in real need of some updates and improvements. This is the perfect opportunity to add your own content and links. 

You may even see that Wikipedia moderators have flagged the pages for improvement but nobody has made any updates yet. 

These are great windows of opportunity where you can also add in a few well-placed external links too. 

How to Edit Wikipedia Articles

Before you do any editing on Wikipedia, you first need to create an account. 

Once you’re set up with an account, editing in Wikipedia is super simple and intuitive. Find the article or section you want to modify and hit ‘edit’. 

When in the Wikipedia editor, change the dead link or add your content as needed. It’s important you show Wikipedia that you’re doing them a favour and not just shoving in your content.

When you see dead or broken links that aren’t directly relevant to your site, you can consider adding in links to other sites that you know fit. 

Preview the changes and ensure everything is how you want it. You then just need to hit ‘Save page’.  

All that’s left to do is wait and see if your change is approved by Wikipedia moderators. So long as your link is relevant and provides value, there shouldn’t be a problem at this point. 

Remember Wikipedia’s Moderation Process 

Whenever you submit an edit or include a link to your site, it will need to go through human moderation and be approved before it shows up. 

Because of this, it’s unwise to add loads of links solely for the sake of boosting your backlink tally. Wikipedia will realise this and probably won’t approve these links. 

Seeing as humans are going to be checking over your content and links, backlinks to poor quality vague content won’t get approved. 

If you don’t already have some ultra-relevant content that fits the bill of the dead link you’re trying to replace, now’s the time to create some. This is the only way to ensure you have a strong chance of getting your backlink approved by moderators. 

It’s best to add just one or two really well-placed links rather than try and include your links all over the place. 

The Bottom Line on Wikipedia Backlinks

As you can see generating Wikipedia backlinks can really pay off and lead you to other valuable link building opportunities. 

Building backlinks with Wikipedia is a highly effective way of driving more relevant organic traffic directly to your site. 

When you’re thinking of highly authoritative sites for building backlinks to your site, Wikipedia should be at the forefront of your strategy.