Wiki’s are basically like online encyclopedias that are publicly edited. It’s a collective knowledge tool. You’ve probably heard of the most famous once, Wikipedia. If you can get your business listed in Wikipedia, then that is very, very helpful. But it’s also very difficult to get a listing devoted to a business unless you are a big, nationwide company.
However, Wikipedia is only one wiki-style website. There are LOTS of those things. If you research your competitions’ back links and notice that they have lots of wiki links, then chances are they are working with an internet marketing company that is setting up wiki’s as a source of links. Many of these wiki’s are open, meaning anyone can edit them. So you know what you can do? You can change those links to point to your website. In cases where a marketing company is setting up lots of those things for links, they are probably not going to bother ever working on them again. Chances of your link staying intact are quite good.
This is somewhat of a borderline tactic because we’re not dealing with real high quality link sources in most cases. But if you see that these links are helping drive up your competition’s rankings, and they are open wiki’s, you have an opportunity to literally steal links from your competition.
Don’t spend all your time trying to hunt down these types of links. I’m really talking about a very specific situation where your competitors are driving up their ranking by using low quality wiki’s as a source of links. These sites really aren’t benefiting society at large, so you’re not hurting anyone…except your competition.