The purpose of Wikipedia’s and Mapsofworld’s existence is same – they both wish to be and are a reference source. The similarity ends here. Wikipedia is a reference resource for anything and everything under the sun and Mapsofworld is a reference resource for largely maps and to a certain extent, geography, education and travel. The differences begin here, while Wikipedia works largely on a crowdsourcing model, Mapsofworld largely works on creation and regeneration of reference content through direct, primary content efforts. Both approaches have their advantages and limitations. Wikipedia expands magnificently and Mapsofworld focuses on a detailed fact verification and an elaborate presentation mechanism. At times, both show up for the same result terms and the stark contrast in their approaches just can’t be more visible.
A few years back we were doing a research on a fairly complex question: is Russia an Asian country or European? We couldn’t find an appropriate result, anywhere. The next best thing to do than just quoting Wikipedia was to deep dive into the subject and answer it categorically. Tens of hours of extensive research resulted in a little short of 200 words post – all facts, sustainable and substantive. We concluded that Russia is a European Nation with large tracts of land in the Asian Continent. That was our conclusion and it was backed with a list of facts and a summary solution statement.
When it comes to country profiles, Wikipedia is the world leader. There is literally tons of information about any and every geographic or political entity in the world. Does a site like Mapsofworld.com even stand a chance in this competitive scenario? Should we even bother about showing up in Google on terms related to a country’s profile? Yes, we should. Wikipedia has its own take and that can be admired and respected. However, the fact remains that it is not the only take. We decided to relook at our work in this field. Today we get good traffic on key phrases like “About USA” and they all land up on our country profile page. As search goes Wikipedia comes at number one position and we have been rewarded with a fluctuating rank, within top 5 results. We see this as a great achievement of our 3Cs policy of Current, Credible and Consistent. We are very confident that there is place for both Wikipedia and us on reference terms. We are also confident that getting traffic today is just not about doing SEO after the page is made. We believe that if you solve the problem, Google and people would take care of your SEO challenges. Here is our take on “About USA”.
We understand at some stage we would have a huge expansion challenge. That challenge would need us to seriously look at crowdsourcing and generating thousands of pages of content. However, can we do that? As of now, no, we can’t. As of now, we would not accept that challenge. The reason being that a centrally researched and validated content is class apart and it makes for a great read.
This article is going to be a work in progress, I would come back to you shortly and share some more examples and seek some solutions.