Wikivoyage:Search Expedition

The Search Expedition aims to make Wikivoyage the most popular free travel guide on the web. While the quantity and quality of our content has increased significantly since the move to the Wikimedia Foundation, we need to have a large audience who both use our guides for their travels and edit them to constantly improve the site.

Tasks
The following is a list of tasks in no particular order. Some may need discussion or weeks of work, while others can be done in a few simple edits:


 * Useful addition of the Wikivoyage template to Wikipedia articles. (Search engines see the direct link to the Wikivoyage article, not the template code.) See Links from Wikipedia for details on adding links to Wikipedia, and Missing links from Wikipedia for a list of Wikipedia articles that are believed to be missing links to Wikivoyage.
 * The continuous project of replacing WT links on WMF wikis. See Search Expedition/wikitravel.
 * Promoting the replacement of WT links on other websites (non-WMF wikis, blogs, articles, etc). This might face opposition, so we have to explain our history and goals.
 * Identify which websites link to WT a lot.
 * If applicable, identify who is part of the community of both Wikivoyage and the given website. These people will be more trusted than outsiders, and aware of the processes.
 * Write a template message explaining our history and goals in a convincing way.
 * Working on improving cross-linking between other WMF wikis such as Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Commons, etc.
 * Updating content to differentiate it from any other travel wiki; this overlaps Prose Improvement Expedition to a large degree, but the objective is that text comparison doesn't mistake our wiki for duplicate content or a simple mirror site.
 * Verifying and monitoring our Alexa profile
 * Verifying and monitoring our WOT profile
 * Promoting the inclusion of a new "As featured on Wikivoyage" badge on tourist bureau websites about high-standard articles
 * Working on the widespread inclusion of Wikivoyage links on dmoz
 * Other common SEO techniques and alternative methods of garnering attention
 * Possibly rename the expedition to something all-encompassing and more relevant. See Wikivoyage talk:Search Expedition
 * Contact Android and iOS app developers to switch from WT to WV and point them to http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwikivoyage/latest/
 * Update http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Www.wikivoyage.org_template (add a more descriptive )
 * If you have an account on Wikipedia, you can add WP's Wikivoyage user template to your WP user page.

Article Rankings
The following articles have all undergone recent significant changes and have been reviewed by editors to confirm what impact this has had upon their standing in Google search results. Searches are conducted using the popular, likely and significant search string of "[place name] guide" using the anonymising startpage.com to get search results from Google USA that are not influenced by your location, personalisation, searching history, etc. Since startpage.com can be configured to give 10, 20, 50 or 100 results per page, please express the result as a specific position in the results rather than "on the first page" (which might mean anything from 1st position to 99th!). Also, you may need to use the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" option in order to see both WV and WT in the results.

PageRank
Current PageRank (0 to 10, higher is best):
 * For the Paris article: Wikivoyage 4/10, Wikitravel 6/10
 * For the main page: Wikivoyage 6/10, Wikitravel 6/10

Source: PageRank checker

Tools

 * Wikimedia-specific statistics
 * Special:Statistics
 * https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikivoyage.org
 * http://stats.grok.se/en.voy/latest30/Main%20Page
 * http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikivoyage/EN/SummaryEN.htm (statistics to end of 2018)
 * http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikivoyage/EN/Sitemap.htm (statistics to end of 2018)
 * http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/wikivoyage (Dead link. Is there a replacement link or should we just delete this?)
 * http://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Wikivoyage_%28en%29
 * General statistics
 * https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/summary/wikivoyage.org?IndexDataSource=F
 * http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikivoyage.org
 * http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=wikivoyage&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q
 * http://www.quantcast.com/wikivoyage.org
 * http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wikivoyage.org/
 * http://www.aboutus.org/Wikivoyage.org#web-presence-
 * SEO
 * http://www.copyscape.com/compare.php - compare two URLs to determine similarity.

Members

 * JamesA  >talk (founder)
 * Inas (talk)
 * Nicolas1981 (talk)
 * Nick (talk)
 * ChubbyWimbus