Wikia (the search engine created by the founders of the Wikipedia) has started to do some interesting things. Users can suggest pages and add comments to existing ones. Wikia keeps a log of who is doing what, which is also available for viewing.

And because of Wikia’s democratic ideals, users do not need to be registered to comment on links.

While this system is likely to attract SEOs to add and position otherwise worthless sites, I presume the idea is that as Wikia grows in popularity, a sufficient number of people will influence the search results for the benefit of everyone. One SEO (and his social media friends) could only influence Wikia to a finite extent. If the engine really catches on then the input of the wider public would easily swamp any attempted ‘gaming’ by SEOs. For example, some of my pet Google peeves include pages designed exclusively for generating advertising revenue (i.e. low quality collections of links) and the fact that some sites which ought to be authoritative or drowned out by link after link from intermediaries. For example, if I search for RB Inn, San Diego, a local hotel, on Google, as I scan through the results pages I still have not found the actual Web site for the hotel by page 5. Instead I get a collection of travel reviews and newspaper sites, most of which are fastidious in not providing the link to the hotel’s actual Web site. I believe that such shortcomings would eventually be removed by Wikia’s social model.

On Wikia’s downside it seems that the universe of sites included in Wkia’s index is very small in comparison with Google, Yahoo! et al.

Filed under: SEO by Martyn Whittaker