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Besides, nobody can find the fork anyway. Google banishes such clones to SEO purgatory immediately, from which you are basically guaranteed to never return (esp

Besides, nobody can find the fork anyway. Google banishes such clones to SEO purgatory immediately, from which you are basically guaranteed to never return (especially as a pure clone). That has been true for a decade now, since the days of Stack Exchange complaining about the clones riding their CC licensed content to easy Google ranking. You can put up a perfect clone of Wikipedia, you'll get nearly zero traffic despite having millions of pages of high quality content.

marcthe12 7y ago
Yep. Even the RuneScape wiki owner forked their own wiki after Wikia became malicious in terms of ads. It even supported by RuneScape devs themselves. And even then, the original Wikia wiki is still competing on Google SEO after a full year. And this was a real niche. Imagine a big website.
onei 7y ago
It's true that if you create a perfect fork that search engines will punish you and not even display the results, but that's not to say you can't change that. If the edit-base of a wiki moves with the fork (and this is essential), you can continue to create new content that search engines will index. If you also go back and make tweaks to existing pages, you won't get penalised. It's not a quick process, nor is it simple, but it's possible for a fork can survive, grow and even move above the original.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  If Google et all detect too much cloned content on a domain, its essentially rank banned forever, for any pages whatsoever. Having a few different pages isn't going to help.
  - yabadabadoes 7y ago
    Banned until manual override, so banned until you are substantial to either the community at large or the tech community.
    - throwaway2048 7y ago
      See https://marc.info https://marc.info , its by far the best mailing list archive, popular in open source communities but it absolutely never appears on Google because it has the same content as massively SEOed crap mailing list archives like Nabble. Google has definitely manually unbanned it a few times but it seems to expire after a while.
      - yabadabadoes 7y ago
        Yes, but AFAIK all these archives have nothing to do with their primary source, so while we might all prefer no ads there is no objective way to say marc.info is the authorative source over ad ridden sources. With Wikipedia or stack overflow, I think whoever gets the majority of participants going forward and keeps activity high could start claiming authority in an objective enough sense, and engaged participants are more mindful of organization ethics than random searchers.
    - tempestn 7y ago
      This is the important point. A serious fork of Wikipedia with a large chunk of the community behind it would be dealt with manually by Google; their explicit decision making would be the relevant factor, rather than the algorithm.
  - CharlesColeman 7y ago
    Would de-indexing the clone pages from the start help, so only the improved pages are indexed?

marcthe12 7y ago

Yep. Even the RuneScape wiki owner forked their own wiki after Wikia became malicious in terms of ads. It even supported by RuneScape devs themselves. And even then, the original Wikia wiki is still competing on Google SEO after a full year. And this was a real niche. Imagine a big website.

onei 7y ago

It's true that if you create a perfect fork that search engines will punish you and not even display the results, but that's not to say you can't change that. If the edit-base of a wiki moves with the fork (and this is essential), you can continue to create new content that search engines will index. If you also go back and make tweaks to existing pages, you won't get penalised. It's not a quick process, nor is it simple, but it's possible for a fork can survive, grow and even move above the original.

throwaway2048 7y ago
If Google et all detect too much cloned content on a domain, its essentially rank banned forever, for any pages whatsoever. Having a few different pages isn't going to help.
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  Banned until manual override, so banned until you are substantial to either the community at large or the tech community.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    See https://marc.info https://marc.info , its by far the best mailing list archive, popular in open source communities but it absolutely never appears on Google because it has the same content as massively SEOed crap mailing list archives like Nabble. Google has definitely manually unbanned it a few times but it seems to expire after a while.
    - yabadabadoes 7y ago
      Yes, but AFAIK all these archives have nothing to do with their primary source, so while we might all prefer no ads there is no objective way to say marc.info is the authorative source over ad ridden sources. With Wikipedia or stack overflow, I think whoever gets the majority of participants going forward and keeps activity high could start claiming authority in an objective enough sense, and engaged participants are more mindful of organization ethics than random searchers.
  - tempestn 7y ago
    This is the important point. A serious fork of Wikipedia with a large chunk of the community behind it would be dealt with manually by Google; their explicit decision making would be the relevant factor, rather than the algorithm.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  Would de-indexing the clone pages from the start help, so only the improved pages are indexed?