Google Penguin , Google's new algorithm, penalizes, among other things, the excess of links with the same anchor text (anchor text).
In the WebMasterWorld forum several users comment that they have been penalized by Google because of Wikipedia . Here is the translated text of the problem of one of them:
“My newly revamped website has been cited on Wikipedia as a resource on a very important page. I have no idea who did this, but obviously I was really excited at first because someone felt my site was relevant enough to be featured on it.
This seems to have caused a myriad of problems at Google. Because the name of my website is a popular niche word (an Exact Match Domain , but short), which is the keyword that Wikipedia uses to link to me. My problem is that there are dozens, even hundreds of websites scraping (copying) Wikipedia and now my word appears as the anchor text on those websites .
It seems that Google has penalized me for this , because from their point of view there are dozens of links with the same anchor text. Since my website is relatively young, this leads to a very large profile-to-link ratio and I don't think this seems natural.
I explained this to Google in a reconsideration request as a result. A few hours before that I received an “unnatural links” notification as a red flag. Now two weeks later my rankings have not improved at all for that keyword (which is the name of my website), whereas before I was ranking well for that term.”
Some solutions to the penalty
Ask for a reconsideration and see if you are lucky since all the cases that are commented on have been rejected.
Delete the Wikipedia link. Hopefully some scrapers will update the content copied from Wikipedia.
Do link building with other anchor text such as: synonyms, "click here" and derivatives, without anchor text, etc. Here is an anti-penguin link building guide.
Prevention is better than cure. So do not put a link on Wikipedia whose anchor is the word with which you want to position yourself, and if it is the same as the domain, even less so.
My opinion on this Google penalty
In my opinion the boy put the link before the Penguin on Wikipedia and it backfired. Regardless of who has put it, I think that Google should be able at this point to control the scraped content and devalue those links or not give them importance as for a penalty. In addition, if the content has been scraped, the links should be kept in the original "no follow" of Wikipedia, so Google should understand that these links are not placed with the interest of manipulating PageRank. But the "no follow" at present is not even useful for this...
So if you have a site that has been "linked" on Wikipedia for a popular term (terms that are sensitive to being scraped) and your site is not bulletproof like SEOmoz , i.e. authoritative and popular enough to suffer a penalty of this type, watch out!
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