How to Get Links from Wikipedia

There are a number of different ways that you can get links from Wikipedia and luckily for you, I'm going to share all of them with you here. Let's begin with the first part, which is all focused around Wikipedia citations.

Posted by:Matthew Barby

Here's the process:

Step 1: First things first, hop on over to WikiGrabber.com. If you haven't heard of WikiGrabber before then you're missing out - big time! In a nutshell, it's a tool that identifies any pages on Wikipedia that are missing citations or contain dead links (you can view a full list of Wikipedia pages that have dead links on them that need replacing here).

Step 2: Search for a keyword related to your niche within WikiGrabber to find articles that may be relevant to you that need citations. For example, you could search for Marketing. Here's an example of an article that needs citations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_marketing (the article is titled, The History of Marketing).

Step 3: Click on one of the Wikipedia entries in the list of results from WikiGrabber and press CTRL+F on your keyboard (if you're a Windows user, that is) and search for 'citation needed'. This will show up all of the different citations that are needed within the Wikipedia entry. These are all of the opportunities for you to create some content that could be used as a citation.

Step 4: Build out a piece of content that can be used as a citation for the specific sentence/paragraph that requires one. You can check out a few of the other cited articles within the Wikipedia entry to get a feel for what is required. I usually write up a short brief for a specialist freelance writer and get them to create a piece of content that does the job.

Credibility is very important here and you need to ensure that you're referencing all of your sources within your article correctly. Treat it like an academic article and use Harvard referencing. Once you've created the content, publish it on your website.

Step 5: Now it's time to get the Wikipedia article updated with your citation added. One way to do this is to create a Wikipedia account and edit the article yourself. There's a problem with this though... Wikipedia editors are very strict.

The way to give yourself the best possible chance of success is to work with an experienced Wikipedia editor. This is the way I go about it and it works a treat. You're probably wondering how you find these editors, right? Well, hop on over to People Per Hour and there are a few there. I'd avid Fiverr.com for this but UpWork.com could also be a good starting point.

Option 2: Wikipedia Dead Links

This is a similar but slightly different approach to the above process. Instead of creating a piece of content from scratch that can be used on a Wikipedia article needing a citation, it will focus on Wikipedia article that have citations with broken links.

Step 1: Go back to WikiGrabber and search for a keyword relevant to your niche. This time, instead of going through to Wikipedia entries that need citations, look for those that have dead links (you can check out an extensive list of these pages here as well).

Step 2: Select one of the entries (here's an example page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_marketing) within the list and search the webpage (with CTRL+F) for the words, dead link. This will show a link through to a citation that is now responding with a 404 error (i.e. the webpage no longer exists). This is your opportunity to replace that link with your own.

Step 3: Grab the URL of one of the dead link in the Wikipedia entry and jump on over  to Wayback Machine. If you don't know already, Wayback Machine is a huge archive of webpages over the past years. Using Wayback Machine you can check out what a webpage used to look like some time ago - this is exactly what you're going to do for the dead link(s) in the Wikipedia entry you've found.

Step 4: Using the snapshot of the webpage from Wayback Machine, you can rewrite the article so that it covers all of the same points but becomes an original piece. If you'd prefer, you could just brief a copywriter to do exactly that - it should make for a really easy job and wouldn't cost a lot at all. You could even use a service like iWriter to do it.

Step 5: Publish the rewritten content onto your website and have an experienced Wikipedia editor edit/update the citation within Wikipedia. You're much more likely to get the edit accepted because you're following a proven and trusted piece of content as a guide. This is 10x easier than creating it from scratch.

An Added Bonus...

Yes, there's even more!

You can also plug each of the dead links into Majestic, Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs to find out if any other websites are linking to them. If they've been cited in Wikipedia then the likelihood of this is very high.

Once you've identified any other sites with broken links to the same resource, get in touch with them and send them through the link to your updated resource - you should get a pretty good response from this.

Option 3: Create Your Own Wikipedia Page

This one's fairly self-explanatory but often overlooked. I've worked on a number of campaigns where I've had Wikipedia pages created for companies that I've worked with. They don't even need to be huge businesses in most cases - it's more about structuring the page correctly and following Wikipedia's guidelines.

Again, it's important to have an experienced Wikipedia editor upload the article and also check through it to ensure it follows Wikipedia's guidelines.