If you’ve been using Google to search for just about anything lately, you’ve probably noticed a strange trend: entries from Wikipedia appear at or near the top of the first results page. What’s going on here? Is it something we should worry about? What, if anything, should you do about it for the sake of your web site?
The first thing you should know is that you're not imagining this trend. Hitwise recently reported that Wikipedia's share of Google downstream traffic has gone up 166 percent over the past 12 months. Wikipedia receives 70 percent of its traffic from the search engines. Google by far is the largest source of search engine traffic for the online encyclopedia anyone can edit; half of Wikipedia's visitors show up as a result of being referred from Google.
Wikipedia's rise is also being recorded by comScore. It entered the Internet ratings company's top ten sites for most unique visitors for January 2007. This is the first time it has done so; it was number 13 the previous month. Here are the top sites in descending order, along with their number of unique visitors, rounded to the nearest million:
Yahoo sites, 129 million
Time Warner Network, 117 million
Microsoft sites, 115 million
Google sites, 113 million
eBay, 81 million
Fox Interactive Media, 75 million
Amazon sites, 51 million
Ask network, 49 million
Wikipedia sites, 43 million
New York Times Digital, 40 million
With all due respect, there's more going on here than Stephen Colbert's efforts to vandalize Wikipedia's articles and encourage others to do the same. In one recent week, Wikipedia was the third most popular site in Google's downstream, right after MySpace and Google Image Search. Some think that Wikipedia could be the next Internet giant, and a real challenger to Google's throne.
Google Optimization 
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