I think the short answer is: no. Why would they care? Better than just plugging in a term into a search engine and getting nothing but spam sites.

Reasons Wikipedia is ranking so well everywhere:

Many many many backlinks (when I blog about something people don't understand, I use wikipedia as a reference, even though it's probably not 100% accurate, and others do the same)

Lots of concentrated content (many pages, each page specifically about a specific subject/keyword)

Great SEO Practics (From headings to Title tags to URL naming to internal navigation, etc)

Personally, I think wikipedia "deserve" to be where they are, it would be unfair to penalize a large site from getting the rankings they deserve because "the information is not 100% accurate".

If people would rank on content rather than links, they wouldn't be so upset with Wiki listings. There are plenty of smaller Wikis that show up in search results because they have better content.

Once again, the SEO community insists on shooting itself in the foot by spreading fear and ignorance. It's not all about links.

I outrank wikipedia on many terms, I'll be 1-3 and wikipedia will be 4 or 5. Its not impossible to beat them... but then again the site I outrank them with has been around longer than wikipedia.

The point is though that in my niche someone could say Google treats me specially, which isn't at all true.

I think Wikipedia showing up in that many searches are just great and something regular people really appreciate. Remember that most people searching the net dont even know what Wikipedia is, so pointing them in that direction is a very good thing imo.

Since Wikipedia offers a trusted source for getting information on... just about anything, it ought to be ranked on the higher end of the results.

I'm amazed how few people take advantage of the open linking available to them on Wikipedia though. If your site has to do with that keyword, and you can provide valuable additional info beyond whats in the wiki, go ahead and add the link. Free traffic!

The results are EVEN MORE DRAMATIC in Yahoo's latest update

But in the case of Google, Amazon is also ranking equally as high.

The results are EVEN MORE DRAMATIC in Yahoo's latest update

But in the case of Google, Amazon is also ranking equally as high.

Im sorry, but i think this is totaly abusive:

If you search for "marketing" in Google.pt you have on the first SERPs:

#1 pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
#3 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
#5 de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
#7 fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing

The rest is "normal" pages..dont you think this is anoying?!?

And don´t tell me that there aren`t good pages about marketing, because we all know that is not true.

One Wikipedia link is Ok, but 4 out of Ten, i think is ridiculous

Im sorry, but i think this is totaly abusive:

If you search for "marketing" in Google.pt you have on the first SERPs:

#1 pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
#3 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
#5 de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
#7 fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing

The rest is "normal" pages..dont you think this is anoying?!?

And don´t tell me that there aren`t good pages about marketing, because we all know that is not true.

One Wikipedia link is Ok, but 4 out of Ten, i think is ridiculous

We should think about user intent, as well. If most searchers as just looking for reference material when searching for "marketing", they what's wrong with wiki? If they are looking for something else, then the SE failed to understand the intent (researcher, buyer, etc).

Dave Cole: Yes other wikis/sites may have better content, but when youre doing issues of scalability (like trying to analyze the entire WWW), you need to pick and choose somehow. And for Google, it seems to comes down to a matter of link trust factors.

As a webmaster, I've found it annoying. However, whenever I am trying to find some info, its Wikipedia that usually bails me out. The content is generally legit.

The real question is that how can search engine optimizers benefit from the use of wikipedia.

One idea is to install wikipedia as a faq on your own websites thereby helping to take advantage of the power of wikipedia working for your business.

I was walking through an explanation of Google Co-op this morning with someone and found a wikipedia entry under refined results for "Symptoms" on the first page. #10, but still above other "tagged" pages. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=migraine+more:condition_symptoms&cx=disease_for_patients&sa=N&oi=cooptsr&resnum=0&ct=col1&cd=2

Google captures the online ad budgets of 300,000 businesses right? Do you think they want to drive targeted traffic to commerical websites that compete against them for those same online ad dollars? Dont you think it would be smart if Google drove that traffic to government sites, acedemic sites, blogs, wikipedia and any other site that doesnt sell advertising? Now that you understand....you'll undrdtand why those sites dominate Google results! They arent stupid

can anybody plz tell me how wikipedia is doing this so that most of the times it tops google search

Wiki have three things going for them: 1) tons of inbound links where the anchor text contains high value terms of every possible combination (wiki has 437,824 inbound links to its site from other sites according to Yahoo!, 2) they have lots of internal links and 3) they have tons of pages with very deep content on every imaginable subject. So lots of inbound links + lots of internal links + lots of content = a winning combination of SEO attributes that no one else on the planet can beat. Certainly Google did not set out to make wiki number one or pre-eminent in their fields. Google is only out to make Google number 1. Wiki just has the perfect storm of seo advantages.