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Fandom's entire business model is to absolutely demolish SEO rankings on any other wiki and display sometimes extremely obnoxious ads in the pages, having had a

Fandom's entire business model is to absolutely demolish SEO rankings on any other wiki and display sometimes extremely obnoxious ads in the pages, having had a lot of people contribute to wikis on it and increasingly absorbed smaller wiki hosting providers and not done such invasive things until they had eaten the world, and not letting any wiki local admins override it. So yes, they will absolutely forcibly keep things open and keep giggling at winning the SEO game even if people decide to migrate off because they hate what's being done. I think a lot of the reason people hate it is that they often act like they don't need to have any discussion with anyone before making unilateral changes like renaming a wiki's URL because they think it will SEO optimize better, or the recent controversy where McDonalds went to them and said "we would like to hand you a sack of money to override this article for a while for an ad campaign" and Fandom said "ooh, money" and did it.

yesco 3y ago
Fandom is actually one of the main reasons I switched to Kagi as my primary search engine. Being able to manually down rank or even ban some of Fandom's domains from my search results has resulted in a dramatic quality improvement, something I'm very willing to pay for. I honestly find it shocking that Google allows Fandom to get away with it's shenanigans all considered. For casual searches, community wikis are the primary repositories for quality results, yet they seemingly put very little effort into actually ensuring they present the correct one. I'm positive they do a certain degree of curation to search results for News reporting, to fight "misinformation". Why not do this for community wikis as well? It certainly wouldn't require the same level of effort as news, and just changing the rankings of a single domain would have a huge impact to an entire category of searches. Sometimes I get the feeling that Google cares more about influencing their users than it cares about returning quality search results these days.
- ectospheno 3y ago
  You can write ublock rules to block domains from search engine results. Several public lists already exist for this purpose. The pattern is simple should you want to add your own.

yesco 3y ago

Fandom is actually one of the main reasons I switched to Kagi as my primary search engine. Being able to manually down rank or even ban some of Fandom's domains from my search results has resulted in a dramatic quality improvement, something I'm very willing to pay for. I honestly find it shocking that Google allows Fandom to get away with it's shenanigans all considered. For casual searches, community wikis are the primary repositories for quality results, yet they seemingly put very little effort into actually ensuring they present the correct one. I'm positive they do a certain degree of curation to search results for News reporting, to fight "misinformation". Why not do this for community wikis as well? It certainly wouldn't require the same level of effort as news, and just changing the rankings of a single domain would have a huge impact to an entire category of searches. Sometimes I get the feeling that Google cares more about influencing their users than it cares about returning quality search results these days.

ectospheno 3y ago
You can write ublock rules to block domains from search engine results. Several public lists already exist for this purpose. The pattern is simple should you want to add your own.