Proposal:Search engine presence

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Strategic Priorities

This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.

1. Achieve continued growth in readership.
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation
4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
5. Encourage Innovation

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Summary

A strong search engine presence is a necessity for our projects, especially for Wikipedias. It's a proposal to develop a Wikimedia team, a global project and local projects to analyze and improve our search engine presence so that our projects obtain an high rank in search engines results.

Proposal

It is proposed to create a team at the foundation level and a project at the meta level with the goal to analyze our projects' search engine performances, develop or maintain a strong search engine presence for our projects, detect problems in search engine results for our projects, propose technical enhancements and develop them with the technical team, discuss and propose other solutions for a better search engine presence. They could work together with local SEO projects with the same goal for their project, when existent.

Those efforts should focus on projects with an already strong search engine presence: Wikipedias and to a lesser extent, Wiktionaries.

Motivation

A strong search engine presence is essential for our projects, for all the benefits of a strong visibility and because they rely on volunteer editors.

Google sends us lot of end-users, including non-editors. If there are search engines for the different Chinese languages, South Asia languages, Arabic and small languages, we should try to get our wikimedia content listed there.

(If there are no search engines for some of our small languages Wikipedias, why not start a search engine by ourselves?)

Key Questions

• how would this be viewed ?
• how to coordinate those efforts ?

Potential Costs

• for the wmf team: developing and maintaining such a team
• for the meta project: none
• for local projects: none
• possible costs for technical enhancements

References

• Wikimedia Visitor Log Analysis Report - Requests by origin: see how many visitors come from search engines.
• [Foundation-l] In defence of Google (January 2007)
• [Foundation-l] Question to post... (August 2009)

Community Discussion

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