Google is sending Wikipedia a serious increase this year. According to a research conducted by Hitwise, Google's downstream traffic going to Wikipedia increased by 166% year over year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06). Last week Wikipedia was the #3 website in Google's downstream, after Google Image Search and MySpace.

Hitwise data showed that for the week ending Feb 10, 2007, 70% of Wikipedia's upstream visits came from search engines, with 50% from Google alone. Google's share of Wikipedia's upstream traffic from Google has increased by 19% over the past year at the same time that Wikipedia's market share of US visits increased by 143%.

The overwhelming favorable increase becomes obvious when you do keyword or phrase searches in Google search engine. Wikipedia's top Google ranking is expected to continue this year. With more optimized keywords, no wonder Wikipedia is creating a wave in the web search engine optimization realm especially in Google search results.