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Yep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads. I find it hard to believe Google does

by ehnto 3y ago

Yep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads. I find it hard to believe Google doesn't have the data required to figure out which sites should be getting domain authority, but I understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines.

theoriginaldog 3y ago
That is the main reason why I fall back to good old book guides. They are actually quite fun and make me nostalgic, because in my childhood we used them too. Piggyback is a publisher that makes great ones, they publish only one per year and put a lot of effort and work in their guides. They made the offical Tears of the Kingdom guide too, can recommend.
iamacyborg 3y ago
Google get paid for the SEO spam though as those sites always run Google Ads.
0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
>… understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines On the other hand, those Stack Overflow clones get top billing all the time. I do not think this is a data problem, but an incentives issue. More ads=good
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  Indeed. And if you have to click through a couple of results to find an actual answer, they get ad revenue X times over answering your question with the first result. There was a time when Google Search would nearly always nail it with the first result, but now it feels like you have to wade through several results and be a prompt engineer to find relevant results.
  - dekervin 3y ago
    I use google out of habit. Bing is better and always find the exact result I was searching on google.
CrazyStat 3y ago
Recipes sites too. Recently I was looking at recipes for a dish I wanted to try and noticed that two blogs had identical recipes for "Grandma's X". I scrolled back up to the obligatory five page essay and those were almost identical too--one of them had clearly stolen the story from the other and run it through one of those AI "paraphrase" tools to change words here and there. It was pretty easy to tell which was the original and which the copycat based on some strange word choices in the paraphrased version.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  That's the old pre-AI tools. They just thesaurus substitute.
  - ehnto 3y ago
    Yep, article spinners were the thing as early as 2010, probably earlier. Even more surprising that they are back in search results as I remember them being absent for a while.
    - _delirium 3y ago
      Back when I used to do Mechanical Turk now and then, I would see rewording tasks show up pretty often there too. I assume they were for this kind of purpose. Typically they were just one sentence out of context that you were supposed to reword. I guess they pasted the article back together out of the reworded sentences?
- liveoneggs 3y ago
  Recipes have been one application that OpenAI/ChatGPT is actually really good at. No ads, interactive substitutions/scaling/conversions.
  - Baeocystin 3y ago
    "hey bot, I have {foodstuffs} available, I need to make dinner for n people. Give me some options in the x style" Probably one of my most-used prompts, and it's batting close to 1.000. Every now and then it will make a mistake, like forgetting the salt, putting a step in the wrong order, or the like, but far less often than you'd think. If you already have even a middling amount of kitchen experience, it's a fantastic use case.
lelanthran 3y ago
But they do know. They are incentiviswd to send you to the sites with the most ads, not the site which is most relevant, because they make a ton money off those spam sites and less of dedicated fan sites. At some point I'm gonna say fuck it and simply maintain my own list of searchable links, which score each ad with a single negative point, and each relevant keyword or phrase with a single positive point.
derriz 3y ago
Yeah I don’t get it - without search dominance google’s entire business model is highly vulnerable. Why have they allowed search quality to stagnate while pouring billions into random tech areas where they have little competitive advantage? Nobody wants to see a page of copies/duplicates by SEO rank. I recall years ago there was, for a while, a similar issue with Wikipedia clones but that problem was addressed. Not just games, recipes, but music lyrics, chords, etc - googling almost evert niche interest is rife with it.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > without search dominance google’s entire business model is highly vulnerable. I think the massive amounts of data collected by android devices while we're not using the internet and all the data collected by chrome while we are browsing means that Google no longer needs to mine our internet searches to collect the most intimate details of our daily lives. That's why Google no longer cares about investing time and money into making their search useful for us. In fact, it's better for Google if a company's customers can't find their website due to all the spam because it means that company now has to pay Google to place an ad at the top of search results in order to be seen at all.
- skywhopper 3y ago
  Google earns money on all the ads on all those trash websites. So their immediate incentive is to drive traffic to them regardless of the longer-term reputation cost.
itscrush 3y ago
It does get deeper than just your mentioned surface level of served ads. Many of those wiki ecosystems are used to view-pump twitch channels with embedded players, such as Fextralife's webring of wikis being bought up and built up, and don't forget those "1-feature VIP memberships".
Arrath 3y ago
I mourn the lost era of GameFAQs and rad ASCII art at the head of pure text walkthroughs. Now we have 45 minute youtube videos of "100 new player tips and tricks for Red Dead 2!"
- jcpst 3y ago
  There are people I know where I try to remember how we met, and it’d be because of some obscure corner of the gamefaqs forum.
- 16bitvoid 3y ago
  I just checked to see if GameFAQs was still active and thought that Tears of the Kingdom would be a good game to see if there were any active users still making guides. There's only one...for horse upgrade recipes. I also didn't know that GameSpot acquired them. I too mourn the lost era of GameFAQs.
  - ohdannyboy 3y ago
    I was an active member when GameSpot merged then took over (my account missed the LUE cutoff by less than a year, if you know you know). It was something the owner promised would never happen, and then he repeatedly said it would never go farther then it did. GameFAQers hated GameSpoters. Merging was the beginning of the end IMO, it hurt the community and that was the main thing they had.
botulidze 3y ago
> I guess there's money in the ads. I owned a basic wordpress site with some guides written during COVID for a couple of popular (at that time) mobile games. It appeared in top 3 searches for the <game name> + <guide/event/best ...> combination. Ad revenue was around ~$100 per month peaking around ~$150 at the new content drops. I have abandoned the website since, but it still is generating $100 here and there without me actively working on it for the past 2 years. To the point - yes, there's lot of money if you own a network of similar websites. My competitors were paying $10-30 per guide submitted on their website because a few guides could easily get paid off in a couple of months from ad revenue and keep generating it years afer. I could write more detailed story if someone's interested.
- iamawacko 3y ago
  I'd be interested in something like a blog post about this
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Perhaps a guide? Might make $100/mo!
    - Fatnino 3y ago
      Get paid to make the internet a shittier place and fleece some advertisers at the same time!
  - botulidze 3y ago
    Here you go: https://cubinskyi.club/games/the-economy-behind-mobile-gaming-websites/ https://cubinskyi.club/games/the-economy-behind-mobile-gamin...
    - Shocka1 3y ago
      This was extremely well written and full of information I've always wondered about. Thanks a lot for sharing.
mschuster91 3y ago
Oh Google certainly could moderate their search results or augment them with human knowledge. They'd need a dozen people per country, at most, for such a task. The problem is, Google is already threading a very fine line regarding anti-competition and bias especially in Europe... and say, they would choose "Computer BILD" (a German tabloid) over Heise or Golem (actually respectable media), or the other way around - the outcry would be massive and so would the coming lawsuits. Instead, it's better for Google to let the search go to utter dog shit, blame issues on "algorithms" and get sites to pay to play with ads.
p3rls 3y ago
I have a platform for kpop at kpopping.com The top domain for almost every result in my niche is a shitty wordpress with centered text on a purple background. It makes about $10-15k a month even with its lackluster content. It's had spyware ads and porn ads. Still #1 for every query. The funny part is, bing, ddg are even worse. Welcome to webapps in 2023.
- sizzle 3y ago
  $10-15k a month holy shiz how much traffic are you seeing? Any funny stories? Congrats on your success!
Akronymus 3y ago
> Yep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads. I absolutely loathe to use fandom for that very reason. They game the system to appear first, even when another, better, wiki exists.And it is nigh on unusable. Sadly one game that really depends on the wiki, that I play only has a fandom site (warframe)
- morjom 3y ago
  I think the top of the crop wikis are the ones for Runescape, OldSchool Runescape and Guild Wars 1 & 2. Wowhead is kind of in a league of its own though.

by ehnto 3y ago

theoriginaldog 3y ago

That is the main reason why I fall back to good old book guides. They are actually quite fun and make me nostalgic, because in my childhood we used them too. Piggyback is a publisher that makes great ones, they publish only one per year and put a lot of effort and work in their guides. They made the offical Tears of the Kingdom guide too, can recommend.

iamacyborg 3y ago

Google get paid for the SEO spam though as those sites always run Google Ads.

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago

>… understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines On the other hand, those Stack Overflow clones get top billing all the time. I do not think this is a data problem, but an incentives issue. More ads=good

DistractionRect 3y ago
Indeed. And if you have to click through a couple of results to find an actual answer, they get ad revenue X times over answering your question with the first result. There was a time when Google Search would nearly always nail it with the first result, but now it feels like you have to wade through several results and be a prompt engineer to find relevant results.
- dekervin 3y ago
  I use google out of habit. Bing is better and always find the exact result I was searching on google.

CrazyStat 3y ago

Recipes sites too. Recently I was looking at recipes for a dish I wanted to try and noticed that two blogs had identical recipes for "Grandma's X". I scrolled back up to the obligatory five page essay and those were almost identical too--one of them had clearly stolen the story from the other and run it through one of those AI "paraphrase" tools to change words here and there. It was pretty easy to tell which was the original and which the copycat based on some strange word choices in the paraphrased version.

renewiltord 3y ago
That's the old pre-AI tools. They just thesaurus substitute.
- ehnto 3y ago
  Yep, article spinners were the thing as early as 2010, probably earlier. Even more surprising that they are back in search results as I remember them being absent for a while.
  - _delirium 3y ago
    Back when I used to do Mechanical Turk now and then, I would see rewording tasks show up pretty often there too. I assume they were for this kind of purpose. Typically they were just one sentence out of context that you were supposed to reword. I guess they pasted the article back together out of the reworded sentences?
liveoneggs 3y ago
Recipes have been one application that OpenAI/ChatGPT is actually really good at. No ads, interactive substitutions/scaling/conversions.
- Baeocystin 3y ago
  "hey bot, I have {foodstuffs} available, I need to make dinner for n people. Give me some options in the x style" Probably one of my most-used prompts, and it's batting close to 1.000. Every now and then it will make a mistake, like forgetting the salt, putting a step in the wrong order, or the like, but far less often than you'd think. If you already have even a middling amount of kitchen experience, it's a fantastic use case.

lelanthran 3y ago

But they do know. They are incentiviswd to send you to the sites with the most ads, not the site which is most relevant, because they make a ton money off those spam sites and less of dedicated fan sites. At some point I'm gonna say fuck it and simply maintain my own list of searchable links, which score each ad with a single negative point, and each relevant keyword or phrase with a single positive point.

derriz 3y ago

Yeah I don’t get it - without search dominance google’s entire business model is highly vulnerable. Why have they allowed search quality to stagnate while pouring billions into random tech areas where they have little competitive advantage? Nobody wants to see a page of copies/duplicates by SEO rank. I recall years ago there was, for a while, a similar issue with Wikipedia clones but that problem was addressed. Not just games, recipes, but music lyrics, chords, etc - googling almost evert niche interest is rife with it.

autoexec 3y ago
> without search dominance google’s entire business model is highly vulnerable. I think the massive amounts of data collected by android devices while we're not using the internet and all the data collected by chrome while we are browsing means that Google no longer needs to mine our internet searches to collect the most intimate details of our daily lives. That's why Google no longer cares about investing time and money into making their search useful for us. In fact, it's better for Google if a company's customers can't find their website due to all the spam because it means that company now has to pay Google to place an ad at the top of search results in order to be seen at all.
skywhopper 3y ago
Google earns money on all the ads on all those trash websites. So their immediate incentive is to drive traffic to them regardless of the longer-term reputation cost.

itscrush 3y ago

It does get deeper than just your mentioned surface level of served ads. Many of those wiki ecosystems are used to view-pump twitch channels with embedded players, such as Fextralife's webring of wikis being bought up and built up, and don't forget those "1-feature VIP memberships".

Arrath 3y ago

I mourn the lost era of GameFAQs and rad ASCII art at the head of pure text walkthroughs. Now we have 45 minute youtube videos of "100 new player tips and tricks for Red Dead 2!"

jcpst 3y ago
There are people I know where I try to remember how we met, and it’d be because of some obscure corner of the gamefaqs forum.
16bitvoid 3y ago
I just checked to see if GameFAQs was still active and thought that Tears of the Kingdom would be a good game to see if there were any active users still making guides. There's only one...for horse upgrade recipes. I also didn't know that GameSpot acquired them. I too mourn the lost era of GameFAQs.
- ohdannyboy 3y ago
  I was an active member when GameSpot merged then took over (my account missed the LUE cutoff by less than a year, if you know you know). It was something the owner promised would never happen, and then he repeatedly said it would never go farther then it did. GameFAQers hated GameSpoters. Merging was the beginning of the end IMO, it hurt the community and that was the main thing they had.

botulidze 3y ago

> I guess there's money in the ads. I owned a basic wordpress site with some guides written during COVID for a couple of popular (at that time) mobile games. It appeared in top 3 searches for the <game name> + <guide/event/best ...> combination. Ad revenue was around ~$100 per month peaking around ~$150 at the new content drops. I have abandoned the website since, but it still is generating $100 here and there without me actively working on it for the past 2 years. To the point - yes, there's lot of money if you own a network of similar websites. My competitors were paying $10-30 per guide submitted on their website because a few guides could easily get paid off in a couple of months from ad revenue and keep generating it years afer. I could write more detailed story if someone's interested.

iamawacko 3y ago
I'd be interested in something like a blog post about this
- bombcar 3y ago
  Perhaps a guide? Might make $100/mo!
  - Fatnino 3y ago
    Get paid to make the internet a shittier place and fleece some advertisers at the same time!
- botulidze 3y ago
  Here you go: https://cubinskyi.club/games/the-economy-behind-mobile-gaming-websites/ https://cubinskyi.club/games/the-economy-behind-mobile-gamin...
  - Shocka1 3y ago
    This was extremely well written and full of information I've always wondered about. Thanks a lot for sharing.

mschuster91 3y ago

Oh Google certainly could moderate their search results or augment them with human knowledge. They'd need a dozen people per country, at most, for such a task. The problem is, Google is already threading a very fine line regarding anti-competition and bias especially in Europe... and say, they would choose "Computer BILD" (a German tabloid) over Heise or Golem (actually respectable media), or the other way around - the outcry would be massive and so would the coming lawsuits. Instead, it's better for Google to let the search go to utter dog shit, blame issues on "algorithms" and get sites to pay to play with ads.

p3rls 3y ago

I have a platform for kpop at kpopping.com The top domain for almost every result in my niche is a shitty wordpress with centered text on a purple background. It makes about $10-15k a month even with its lackluster content. It's had spyware ads and porn ads. Still #1 for every query. The funny part is, bing, ddg are even worse. Welcome to webapps in 2023.

sizzle 3y ago
$10-15k a month holy shiz how much traffic are you seeing? Any funny stories? Congrats on your success!

Akronymus 3y ago

> Yep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads. I absolutely loathe to use fandom for that very reason. They game the system to appear first, even when another, better, wiki exists.And it is nigh on unusable. Sadly one game that really depends on the wiki, that I play only has a fandom site (warframe)

morjom 3y ago
I think the top of the crop wikis are the ones for Runescape, OldSchool Runescape and Guild Wars 1 & 2. Wowhead is kind of in a league of its own though.