Since the demise of Overtures keyword ranking tool the options for gathering data on what keyphrases searchers are using has become significantly more difficult. Many of the alternative programs available can be helpful but often the results are US based. Wikipedia’s article traffic statistics is looking like a possible alternative to analysing the relationship between rankings and traffic.

The site, which was created by Wikipedia performance engineer/developer and database administrator Domas Mituzas, lets you enter a Wikipedia topic and then presents you with a bar chart giving a day-by-day analysis of hits on the specified page entry.

You only need to perform a Google search on some of the commonest keywords and you’ll find a Wikipedia entry somewhere on the first results page.

Enter “Playstation 3” and the Wikipedia entry comes up in the top 3 of Google rankings. However other search terms are less likely to deliver accurate results “cars” for example, Wikipedia doesn’t appear in the top 10

Whilst it still isn’t the full answer, by using an array of different tools and given the high profile of Wikipedia entries in Google’s results pages, these wiki stats can provide additional reinforcement to other prediction tools of the traffic volumes of the searching communities.