7 ms·

There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

574 points by pizzaiolo 25d ago

robin0716 25d ago
[dead]
miladyincontrol 25d ago
I dont know about this, I've been heading a wiki for a rather specific niche that was made about 1.5 years ago and it easily got most top results for it's focus in just a few months. It sounds like the issue isnt for "independent wikis" but for wikis competing with an existing domain already hosting one on the topic, in this case fandom.com's.
- cookmeplox 25d ago
  What's the wiki? I'm always interested to get more data points on this, because it has definitely applied to wikis for brand new topics that aren't competing with anything on Fandom (it's not the same as the normal "duplicate content penalty" that people talk about)
rao-v 25d ago
As a bandaid solution we probably just need a good base domain for game wikis attached to a somewhat trustworthy foundation (that won’t sellout to Fandom in a week). Agree that wierdgloop.org is not … great
- fakwandi_priv 25d ago
  What’s wrong with wiki.gg?
  - dreadpiratewiki 25d ago
    run by the same people that sold Gamepedia to Fandom, is owned by private equity, and has been rapidly increasing ads/monetization over the last couple years
    - 6thsurvivor 25d ago
      wasn't that a part of a curse inc. leftover bundle after amazon got twitch and got rid of everything else? Afair nobody else wanted that, but can't find the old HN post on it
  - iamacyborg 25d ago
    Tons of ads.
- copper-float 25d ago
  What's wrong with weird gloop? The RuneScape wikis are very high quality, same with the Minecraft wiki. Cook and others running are transparent and seem to have good intentions.
  - cookmeplox 25d ago
    I think you can love what we're doing with the wikis, but also be candid that it's not an optimal reader-facing domain name. It was never really intended to be that - it's literally just named after a random item in RuneScape I discovered But it ended up being the only reasonable place we owned where we could put Fortnite, Overwatch and Valheim wikis that wouldn't get crushed by this new Google jail situation. Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first. Chicken and egg.
    - yreg 25d ago
      Thank you so much for what you do. > Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first. So why not get such domain, wait out until it is let out of Google Jail and then put all the wikis on subdomains? I imagine you would quickly gain trust and people would immediately recognize the links and know that this is the place to go. As opposed to the current state where the wikis have separate domain names and for each game we need to learn which one is the "good one". ⸻ Second question: Any thoughts on liberating non-gaming wikis from fandom, such as TV show wikis?
      - dianliang233 25d ago
        Re the first question, you have to park at least one wiki on said domain for around a year, during which Google will refuse to show other page other than the main page. That's just not really a realistic option is it.
        25d ago
- mitxela 25d ago
  miraheze.org?
KingMob 25d ago
This is a shame because Fandom is frequently terrible, but also consumes all the oxygen.
- nephihaha 25d ago
  It depends on which part. It is certainly heading down the same route as Wikipedia with all the problems that entails. You're usually better off on a smaller Fandom wiki as it won't have beeb taken over yet. The James Bond wiki is particularly bad, but Memory Alpha seems to be better run.
  - einpoklum 25d ago
    > It is certainly heading down the same route as Wikipedia with all the problems that entails. Can you elaborate on what that means? i.e. what aspect of Wikipedia, and in what way Fandom is heading there?
    - nephihaha 24d ago
      The main issues I have are with the administration. I have noticed: * Admin enshittifying content that they have no knowledge or interest in. For example, I have witnessed admin trying to get articles about certain rugby union teams deleted, because they were amateur. (Before the 1990s all rugby union was officially amateur, and some notable clubs still are, especially in places like Argentina or Scotland, where professional clubs are not the norm.) They succeed in many cases. * Administrators may develop a particular dislike for a user, and their decisions may be based on that. I have witnessed personal vendettas and stalking behaviour from them. There are also cliques of friends and other conflicts of interest. Neither of these are professional if we are thinking purely in terms of content. Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, would get articles cross-checked by people who have an interest or a knowledge of that particular subject. I have seen quotations "corrected" on Wikipedia from their original wording. As for Fandom, it varies from site to site. Some are better than others. In recent years, Fandom has adopted some community guidelines which are questionable and are being applied across the board. Wikimedia did the same in a top-down power move with no mandate whatsoever. It was a fait accompli. Neither are better for it. The Broad Scots and Scottish Gaelic Wikipedias both have horrific administration issues, brought on partly by people correcting native speakers. The former created a minor international scandal in the media. The Greenlandic Wikipedia was hijacked by a German who ended up shutting it down. (He deleted other people's articles constantly, instead of improving the content and then wondered why he was the only person left in the room.) Either way, both remind me of the infinite monkey idea... Except those on the typewriter aren't even getting peanuts unless someone is paying them to write shill articles (and there are many of those.) I'm sure I'll be voted down for making these comments which is why I was reluctant to post earlier.
josephjrobison 25d ago
The bar has been raised on all web content for Google to index, esp new domains like you say but even some subdomains. That answer is quality content (higher than AI or human medians), links and pr and social activity and mentions, and then user experience.
- watwut 25d ago
  Google search results dont care about content quality. And did not for years already. It killed good quality blogs and sites long before the AI slop came in.
- microtherion 25d ago
  And yet, I have to dig my way through pages upon pages of AI trash sites for many Google queries. Somehow THOSE don’t seem to have a problem getting indexed (Maybe they run a sufficient number of ads?).
  - willtemperley 25d ago
    Given none of the wikis pointed to in the article have ads, I'd say you're right.
- charlieyu1 25d ago
  Have they fixed the scam problem though?
- basilikum 25d ago
  Google may actively prefer AI slop over human quality content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc
  - mitxela 25d ago
    Obviously Google uses AI to rate sites, because everyone uses AI for everything, and AI has been proven to rate AI-generated text higher than human-generated.
nephihaha 25d ago
Google has been removing blogs from its searches for years now. You have to search for them specifically. All part of the de-democratisation of the web.
- mitxela 25d ago
  Try Marginalia.
leonidasrup 25d ago
Courts should review past decisions Field v. Google, Inc. (2006) https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-and-Copyright-Law https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-a... Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. (2015) https://www.flaglerlawgroup.com/a-new-era-for-fair-use-court-changes-fair-use-law-in-google-decision/ https://www.flaglerlawgroup.com/a-new-era-for-fair-use-court...
- mitxela 25d ago
  It doesn't work like that. Past decisions don't get changed. If facts have changed you need a new decision.
skhameneh 25d ago
For a while, Fandom was having annoying ads and content that would get past my ad blocker. But a recent update has caused them to block users with ad blockers. I've been looking for explicit alternatives to Fandom for some content and it's annoyingly sparse. Just the other day I saw some meme about how if we saw as many ads taking over sites like we do now, that was a sure sign of having your machine getting infected with a virus. Generally I've found a good portion of websites that block users with ad blockers tend to be the worst offenders with aggressive ads...
- nicce 25d ago
  > Just the other day I saw some meme about how if we saw as many ads taking over sites like we do now, that was a sure sign of having your machine getting infected with a virus. That used to be the reality around decade ago for those who don’t know. Some applications changed the default front page of the browser, hijacked other websites to inject popups and so on
  - AlAjem 25d ago
    >around decade ago Two decades now actually. By 2016 we were already seeing the mass transition to browsing on phones instead of PCs, Windows 10 was already out and for reasons I am not quite sure of the old homepage and toolbar hijackers were on the decline and adblockers were on the rise although I am sure there were still people using malware ridden Internet Explorers for years after. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_hijacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_hijacking
    - nicce 25d ago
      Ouch, already 11 years since the Windows 10 release.
      - mitxela 25d ago
        It really was the last Windows anyone with a brain would ever care about.
remedan 25d ago
I enjoy the this extension that redirects search results from Fandom and other such terrible hosts to their higher quality indie alternatives. https://github.com/IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy https://github.com/IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy
- iamacyborg 25d ago
  This is great for users, but it’s terrible for the SEO of those independent wikis as you’re telling Google you want to click on Fandom and Fextra links. /edit It appears this is no longer the case and the extension does things a lot better than it used to!
  - maroider 25d ago
    That might be true for the default config in the extension, but you can also configure the extension to de-emphasize fandom wikis or outright hide them in search results. I don't quite remember the exact default config though.
    - Kayvanian 25d ago
      The default config is good for SEO, which is to re-order search results to put independent wikis above Fandom (driving clicks to the independent wiki), as well as disabling Fandom results + injecting a button to the indie wiki.
  - Kayvanian 25d ago
    Indie Wiki Buddy re-orders search engine results to move independent wiki results above Fandom, driving clicks to the independent wiki. And for cases where the independent wiki doesn't show up, the Fandom result is disabled and a separate button is added that links directly to the independent wiki.
- deleted 25d ago
  [deleted]
- opello 25d ago
LoganDark 25d ago
Anyone remember when "Fandom" was called Wikia? It really started going down the gutter when it started TikTokifying itself by trying to act as an entertainment hub. It was supposed to be a neutral resource for people to build community-driven knowledge bases but it turned into some real gamified garbage. I've never really been comfortable with the concept of addressing a "fandom" as one whole anyway, even in general, so the new act is just complete crap to me.
- ButlerianJihad 25d ago
  Fandom probably hosts more copyrighted images and media than the Internet Archive does. Entertainment studios can often turn a blind eye to use of their properties when it's by fans, for fans, and promotes those franchises. They are not sending C&D to people making avatars, or cosplaying, or memeing their screengrabs into notoriety. It is weird to think that the WMF and Wikia/Fandom had a common founder and origin.
- pwdisswordfishq 25d ago
  I remember when it was called Wikicities.
- NobodyNada 25d ago
  It was still crap back when it was Wikia. The website itself wasn't so bad yet, but the actual content of most Wikia wikis was very poor quality (often wrong, outdated, and/or poorly sourced; lack of maintenance and amateurish writing/presentation). I quickly learned to not click on Wikia search results whenever I could help it, whereas an independent wiki was a sign that the community cared enough to run their own servers. The only Wikia sites that had anything worthwhile were the ones that started as independent communities and got bought out, like Memory Alpha or the Minecraft wiki.
  - LoganDark 24d ago
    I have nostalgia for real, community-driven crap. I have absolutely no nostalgia for this top-down systematic destruction of value.
- 24d ago
fergie 25d ago
I am slightly on the fence about this. If the goal is simply to provide a good platform for people to create and share information with each other, then it shouldn't matter if the wiki is indexed in Google or not, in fact "invisibility" might even increase the quality of contributions. OTOH if the goal is to monetize other people's contributions then yes, I totally get why the "Google jail" would be bad for that, but I'm just not sure that its a cause worth fighting for- that road basically leads to a new Fandom.
- cookmeplox 25d ago
  I think this logic falls apart if you realize that wikis only "work" when you're able to get some of the readers to turn into long-term contributors, and losing 90% of your traffic by not showing up on Google is a great way to kill that funnel. There's a ton of historical evidence of wiki migrations (1) starting out with all of the editors and none of the readers, (2) not doing anything to get those readers to the new site, and (3) ultimately losing the whole war because the reader->editor flow was still happening on the Fandom wiki. "Invisibility" is absolutely not desirable here, even if your only goal is maximizing the amount of good contributions.
  - fergie 25d ago
    Yes, but the point is that maybe in 2026 we should be looking at ways to pay contributors/creators, rather than steal from them (slightly hyperbolic, but you get the gist)
    - philipwhiuk 25d ago
      The financialisation of all hobbies is extreemely toxic and that's what you're perpetuating here.
      - mitxela 25d ago
        Interestingly since people brought up the RuneScape wiki, RuneScape is a demonstration. They financialised the game around 2011, it went down the shitter, player numbers dropped, then plummeted once they turned it into a shitty WoW clone. They revived an old backup one day as an experiment and it grew to actually have 5 times more players than the enshittified original. It's not still running the backup - they've evolved it alongside the main game but with players having veto power over almost every single decision. Turns out they know what they like in the game, who knew.
jimnotgym 25d ago
I'm going to agree. I launched a website that is niche a few weeks ago, but totally unique. After a couple of weeks search console wakes up to tell me that they have indexed one page in 80. And that the top search term that is finding my site says exactly the name of one of my pages, yet Google is showing my homepage in search! Way to help your users
- einpoklum 25d ago
  > Way to help your users Dear Jim, At Google, our intent is to help our stockholders, not our users. Sincerely, Alphabet inc.
  - phyzix5761 25d ago
    That's every company
    - sph 25d ago
      It’s not every company having the effective monopoly on what can be found (i.e. what exists) on the web.
      - phyzix5761 25d ago
        Every company is in it for the profits and benefits of its shareholders. Its idiotic to think that companies have benevolent intent toward their customers. If that wasn't the case they would go out of business.
        latexr 25d ago
        Not every company is publicly traded, so they don’t have shares nor shareholders. Also, not every company is a massive behemoth who only cares about profit above all. Plenty of people start companies with the goal of providing something useful and good at fair prices and value their customer relationships. We should really stop with this cynical view that every company is run by greedy bastards who have active contempt for their customers and using it to excuse the behaviour of the worst offenders.
accountrequired 25d ago
Whatever that github wiki mirror is doing, try that. You know the one, always at the top of search results...
- mitxela 25d ago
  Deepwiki? The AI slop site?
deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
unglaublich 25d ago
> Subdomains of existing domains are totally fine Damn, another push to centralizing and walling off user content in 'fandoms', 'reddits' and other closed communities? Have the internet cards been handed out now, and are we in the end-game? Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?
- captainbland 25d ago
  It wouldn't surprise me. It seems like a mirror of the social media move from social graphs to recommendation engines. You are either producer or consumer and never shall consumer be promoted organically.
  - anal_reactor 25d ago
    The answer is simple. Limit your time on social media the way you'd be limiting a child and focus on IRL interactions.
    - KingMob 25d ago
      Words of wisdom to heed. Thank you, user anal_reactor :‑D
      - anal_reactor 25d ago
        Stay open for more nuggets of wisdom!
    - captainbland 25d ago
      I also find IRL social interactions also want pacing to some degree. But I don't know, I find my brain is sort of wired for these sorts of novel, pseudonymous interactions from a young age.
      - anal_reactor 25d ago
        Yeah I get that. But treat them like candy - it's okay to eat a small dessert after lunch, it's okay to eat entire bucket of ice cream once in a while, but you know, your main diet needs to be quality stuff.
ahakoiro 25d ago
[flagged]
amazingamazing 25d ago
I am more confident fandom will exist than “weirdgloop”, 10 years from now. Who is laying the bills for weirdgloop? This does not say. From how it is written seems to be a one man show: https://weirdgloop.org/blog/why-were-helping-more-wikis-move-away-from-fandom#what-im-offering https://weirdgloop.org/blog/why-were-helping-more-wikis-move...
- dianliang233 25d ago
  They do ads on the RuneScape Wiki[1]. A couple of their wikis are also official wikis funded by game studios, such as Jagex for the RuneScape Wiki, Riot Games for Leagues, 2xko and Valorant, and Digital Extremes for Warframe. [1]: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis
- sph 25d ago
  I would bet $100 against your prediction. There are multiple game studios with their official wikis on weirdgloop's infra. Runescape players basically live off its wiki, it's that mandatory, and Jagex is well aware and OK with that.
  - amazingamazing 24d ago
    How many are on fandom?
    - sph 24d ago
      How many are trying desperately to leave it?
      - amazingamazing 23d ago
        Very low percentage. Take a game of year like clair obscur. I will leave it as an exercise for you to see which wiki is biggest and most active.
- deleted 25d ago
  [deleted]
bariscan 25d ago
this is not only wiki, unfortunately google tries something at least for 6 months and "shadowing" is real thing. no manual action, no information, indexes here and valid; but no imp & clicks. make some social noise. signals has always good impact.
- orbital-decay 25d ago
  Google doesn't care. Even massive efforts with humongous communities behind them are ignored for years. Try an incognito tab with a random element from a random game, for example this Fallout 4 quest: https://www.google.com/search?q=Unlikely+Valentine https://www.google.com/search?q=Unlikely+Valentine Fandom, Reddit, IGN, Eurogamer, everything is on the front page except fallout.wiki which is where the community is now.
  - EdwardDiego 25d ago
    Don't worry, the AI overview links to fallout.wiki... Seriously, it does, but I'm very much sarcastic when I say "don't worry".
SyneRyder 25d ago
Some of this might just be problems with the websites themselves. With the Path Of Exile 2 Wiki example, I'm looking at the sitemaps. Once you get through the first sitemap of nested sitemaps (ugh, not a fan of those), the very first actual sitemap returns: XML Parsing Error: no root element found Location: https://www.poe2wiki.net/sitemap/sitemap-poe_wiki-poe2_wiki--NS_0-0.xml Line Number 18040, Column 1 (EDIT: Of course, after I post this, it's now working again...) On to the Hytale Wiki example. I don't know if what I'm about to say applies to Google, but I'm approaching it from the perspective of my tiny dumb indieweb indexer for my personal search engine. It is much easier for me to index from a sitemap rather than try to crawl a website, so I basically look exclusively at sitemaps. Looking at Hytale Wiki, my process: * Site has a robots.txt file - good! * Robots.txt mentions a sitemap - excellent! * The sitemap is stored at /images/sitemaps/index.xml ... oh. I would usually not index anything from a /images/ folder, because I want to index pages only, not images. This would likely trip my exclusion filters. Let's ignore that and continue. * The sitemap is a list of an additional 26 nested Gzipped sitemaps. Oh. This is the point where my tiny dumb indexer would stop. Gzipped sitemaps are part of the standard, but they're relatively rare on the web for small sites. They typically only get used if a sitemap file exceeds the 50,000 pages-per-sitemap limit. In this case, 26 * 50,000 makes the HyTale Wiki look like a 1.3 Million page site. Do I really want to index 1.3 Million pages, an estimated 13GB of indexed text data, about a video game I'll probably never play? My search index is storage constrained, and my indexer is very time constrained. The time I spend indexing your site is time not spent indexing another, possibly higher quality website. So at this point, I'd just grab the front page and disappear... like Google apparently does too. Of course, the HyTale site isn't 1.3 Million pages, it's only 4,277 articles. That would all fit in the root sitemap file, and that might be the better approach for getting indexed.
- SyneRyder 25d ago
  Me again! I couldn't figure out why I was getting transient errors on that Poe2wiki sitemap, so I tried looking at other sitemaps on the site. I'm getting transient errors on all of them. Then I realized - the sitemap files are being overwritten in real time. Every edit on the Wiki is causing the sitemap file to be edited in real time. That's why the sitemaps sometimes stop right in the middle of a filename when I access it - the sitemap file is in the process of being rewritten. That's a behavior unique to a Wiki, and might explain the entire phenomenon.
arjie 25d ago
I host my blog etc. on Mediawiki. It has a bunch of defaults that make it not SEO friendly. I was absent from all search engines for a year and told a friend[0] how it was funny that I guess Google no longer ranks personal sites and he told me he’d look and see. It turned out that default Mediawiki stuff doesn’t do a lot of standard SEO stuff. I just did all of it. From the jsonld tags, to the meta description, to making sure the sitemaps were correct. As soon as I did, my site started showing up on Google. I cannot speak to these wikis’ problems but the first port of call for me would be checking that everything “standard” for this is now done. It’s just a reality of the web these days. I do get random traffic from Google now. Much less than I used to under the old regime in the 2000s but it feels more like a secular change than the flat zero listings I previously did. I wish I had kept track of everything so that one day I could say what I did but I just followed literally everything, including removing the index.php thing that Mediawiki uses by default. So I cannot even say which actions worked and which didn’t. I can’t even recall which changes to base I did do. Link rel canonical. A robots.txt that disables access to pages that accidentally duplicate content (e.g. permalink pages). Hard to tell. But the difference was stark 0 to hundreds of pages. Literally zero dude. And it happened weeks after the changes and very suddenly. 0: It’s not what he does as a job but he might remember https://www.jrhizor.dev/ https://www.jrhizor.dev/
sylware 25d ago
It is much much worse than that: the real jail is the "web javascript" of the web engines of the whatwg cartel, well roughly speaking.
HexPhantom 25d ago
The most interesting part here is that this isn't really an SEO problem anymore, it's a dependency problem
presango 25d ago
[flagged]
raincole 25d ago
When I still payed Dota, there was a wiki hosted on fandom. The experience was terrible. It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch, and on mobile there were so many ads rendering the whole thing unreadable. The catch is that there was a better wiki, called Liquipedia. But Google never showed it first and I kept getting tricked to click that shitty fandom site. (It was years ago. But I just tested it a bit and for most Dota-related keywords, fandom is still ranked higher than liquipedia. I don't know if the quality of fandom site has improved though.)
- saghm 25d ago
  Back when I played WoW, at some point the people running the fandom wiki "forked" it to move to different hosting, and I think even now years later the fandom one (which stopped receiving updates when the fork happened) is still ranked higher in Google searches
  - plorkyeran 25d ago
    WoW is now on wiki number three after the company hosting the second one was also bought by fandom. The original rotting corpse is now over a decade out of date and still often ranks highest.
  - jabroni_salad 24d ago
    Fandom also refused to give back the wowwiki.com domain. A mistake to ever let them manage it.
- warmedcookie 25d ago
  It's still terrible. Also, congrats on escaping the cancer.
- jmuguy 25d ago
  Yeah fandom has done this to several games. its taken a huge effort on the part of the Satisfactory community to make sure people know the official wiki is https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/ https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/ and not the garbage on fandom. Using an extension to block fandom.com results is helpful because for other games I'm not really thinking about it when searching for something and find myself on that tumor of a website.
alxfrnr 25d ago
It's not just for new wikis. It's called the Google sandbox in the SEO world and it's something that had been around for years and affects every new domain. New domains need to prove they can be trusted to get out of the sandbox and external links from trusted sources are the best way to do that and shorten the time spent in the sandbox. Big wikis like this go online with thousands of pages on a brand new domain. Without any external trust signal it just looks like spam for Google
mcv 25d ago
Or maybe we should all just stop using Google. If Google is widely known to be unable to find these fan wikis, maybe people will finally stop relying on Google.
JayNeely 25d ago
The article says this isn't an issue for subdomains of established domains, but the issues it describes match what we experienced setting up a game wiki for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint at https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/ https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/ -- almost a year of not having any pages show up in search results, even though we were getting good links to it and there were no better alternatives that should have ranked (we never started the wiki for this game on any centralized site; at most all they had for it was a placeholder page). Only after months of making sure our Steam news posts were consistently linking to pages within our wiki did we eventually see Google suddenly open the floodgates and start connecting searchers with the info they were searching for. I've built out highly-ranked content sites before, and none of what I'd learned from getting those started seemed to work with this wiki, for no apparent reason. Google Search Console showed plenty of pages on the wiki were indexed; it just wasn't displaying them. Seeing this post I fully believe the premise that there's simply an arbitrary Google Jail for independent wikis. That sucks for search quality.
- mitxela 25d ago
  The problem is that independent wikis don't pay the fandom tax to google for preferred search placement. Have you tried contacting your local corruption bureau to negotiate a rate tailored for your circumstances?
  - panarky 25d ago
    Payment for search placement is not a thing.
    - nfriedly 24d ago
      I would assume they're referring to the advertisements that show up above (and barely distinguishable from) the search results.
    - recursive 24d ago
      It's not called that.
thataccount 25d ago
I stopped worrying about getting indexed by Google around 2008ish when it became apparent they were trying to impose their own rules on the internet and how things were found. Nowadays, I'm content to not have google index anything at all.
ethagnawl 25d ago
It'd be interesting to learn whether or not Gemini ignores them, too. I would guess not, as these sorts of sites tend to be founts of expert knowledge and insight.
- wand3r 25d ago
  Yeah same. I assume this is in response to LLM mass slop SEO hijacking or attempts to do LLM poisoning. It is a hard problem. New domains can launch every second with millions of words and pages. Unless you just moved an already existing wiki with thousands of pages and comments, it would definitely be "irregular" to have a millions of pages and content on a 1 month old site.
wizzwizz4 25d ago
As a workaround, the browser extension Indie Wiki Buddy (https://getindie.wiki https://getindie.wiki) will identify links to a relevant wiki in search results, and rewrite them to the wiki preferred by the community. It's quite useful.
numpad0 25d ago
Sounds like the same behavior as Twitter "shadowbans" in which you get severe visibility penalty after a jackpot. What would be the metric tied to this behavior?
johnnyApplePRNG 25d ago
It's essentially impossible to get any play at all from google search these days. Doesn't matter how legitimate or real your site, service, or project looks. Unless it's been online for at least 2 years, it's 99% probably AI slop spam and google would be risking their brand bending over backwards to try and index the majority of it. That's my take, anyway.
shadedtriangle 25d ago
This happened to my website about learning c++. I was posting new articles daily for a while there and traffic was slowly but steadily rising. Then one day traffic from search went straight to zero and never recovered. The whole project was designed to be Google searched first and not read like a book so that really killed my motivation back then.
gleipnircode 25d ago
Thanks for this article. Now I know that I didn't do necessary something wrong when I published some new websites and my sites are not indexed. Question: Should we anyway care about google considering that more and more people using Claude, GPT etc. for search? Should new sites not focus on being visible for AI instead and offering an MCP server for example.
zackmorris 25d ago
I feel like the currency of the future could be shame. Specifically, that a search engine competing with google could show how poorly each result was found by google, or even use lack of representation on google to rank a site more highly since it contains the truth for example. I also feel like shame correlates strongly with profit. That we're living in an era of lawless lack of accountability, where skirting the law for personal gain is rewarded handsomely. That anyone can make a deal with the devil and rise straight to the top, at least for now in the US until the political pendulum swings from liberty back towards justice.
tstrimple 25d ago
I recently started playing Palworld again with my son. The fan sites are simply terrible. Incomplete information and out of date. Tons of boilerplate nonsense that adds zero value. I used Claude Code to read the game data files and create a personal palworld wiki based on the data actually in the game. Pulled the in-game map assets to use as a foundation and linked between all the things which should have links. Look up a material and you can see all the Pals which drop it. Look up a Pal and you can see where they are found and all the things they drop, etc. Far, far more useful than any of the existing fan sites I found. I also did this with a far more obscure game which doesn't have nearly as much content online. Lucid Blocks. That game was weird AF and the systems didn't make any sense without tons of experimentation. I started by using CC as a journal for things I discovered to help try to build a coherent world view. Ended up just using CC to build a wiki for the game with all the entities and items based off of actual game data.
Catloafdev 25d ago
Google search has really gone to shit in this AI era. The decline has been steep and noticeable. It really makes me wonder what happened behind the scenes over there.
- phyzome 25d ago
  I regretfully added a Deny for Googlebot in my robots.txt this year. Never thought it would come to that.
zoobab 25d ago
I saw my personal website nearly dissapear from Google, because it is hosted on wikidot: http://zoobab.wikidot.com http://zoobab.wikidot.com Before my pages had a high ranking in Google.
ZeWaka 25d ago
We're experiencing this with my open-source game (SS13), can confirm.
amavect 25d ago
I'd like to plug the NIWA wiki network for Nintendo games. I think more independent wikis should federate in similar ways, to strategize beyond just search engine hits. https://www.niwanetwork.org/members/ https://www.niwanetwork.org/members/
dcchambers 24d ago
This is so frustrating. Fandom is a cancer on the web. Independent wikis are treasures. Google needs to fix this.
axionbraid 24d ago
[flagged]
thesuitonym 24d ago
This is not going to be the popular opinion but at this point, if your project is not for profit (As I assume most fan-made wikis are), I've found it's best to just ignore Google. Leads from Google are typically not good anyway, especially if what you're trying to build is some type of community. I understand that Weirdgloop is probably some kind of business, so it makes sense that they would care. And if you care, more power to you, I don't want to discourage anybody. I'm just out here promoting the idea that not everything you do has to be the next big thing. Sometimes it's okay to make a weird project and have only a handful of people care about it.
- balder1991 24d ago
  In fact it’s more important that the right people find it, and it could be linked in a profile etc.
- cookmeplox 24d ago
  "You shouldn't care about Google if you run a wiki" is really common take, and I think it's really harmful/wrong because it badly misunderstands the way that wiki communities actually form, and how losing all of the readers means you eventually don't have any editors. I talk about this more in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606772
pampas 24d ago
When the Google source code leaked it became clear a lot of the ranking boiled down to one big appeal to authority.

574 points by pizzaiolo 25d ago

[dead]

I dont know about this, I've been heading a wiki for a rather specific niche that was made about 1.5 years ago and it easily got most top results for it's focus in just a few months. It sounds like the issue isnt for "independent wikis" but for wikis competing with an existing domain already hosting one on the topic, in this case fandom.com's.

cookmeplox 25d ago
What's the wiki? I'm always interested to get more data points on this, because it has definitely applied to wikis for brand new topics that aren't competing with anything on Fandom (it's not the same as the normal "duplicate content penalty" that people talk about)

rao-v 25d ago

As a bandaid solution we probably just need a good base domain for game wikis attached to a somewhat trustworthy foundation (that won’t sellout to Fandom in a week). Agree that wierdgloop.org is not … great

fakwandi_priv 25d ago
What’s wrong with wiki.gg?
- dreadpiratewiki 25d ago
  run by the same people that sold Gamepedia to Fandom, is owned by private equity, and has been rapidly increasing ads/monetization over the last couple years
  - 6thsurvivor 25d ago
    wasn't that a part of a curse inc. leftover bundle after amazon got twitch and got rid of everything else? Afair nobody else wanted that, but can't find the old HN post on it
- iamacyborg 25d ago
  Tons of ads.
copper-float 25d ago
What's wrong with weird gloop? The RuneScape wikis are very high quality, same with the Minecraft wiki. Cook and others running are transparent and seem to have good intentions.
- cookmeplox 25d ago
  I think you can love what we're doing with the wikis, but also be candid that it's not an optimal reader-facing domain name. It was never really intended to be that - it's literally just named after a random item in RuneScape I discovered But it ended up being the only reasonable place we owned where we could put Fortnite, Overwatch and Valheim wikis that wouldn't get crushed by this new Google jail situation. Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first. Chicken and egg.
  - yreg 25d ago
    Thank you so much for what you do. > Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first. So why not get such domain, wait out until it is let out of Google Jail and then put all the wikis on subdomains? I imagine you would quickly gain trust and people would immediately recognize the links and know that this is the place to go. As opposed to the current state where the wikis have separate domain names and for each game we need to learn which one is the "good one". ⸻ Second question: Any thoughts on liberating non-gaming wikis from fandom, such as TV show wikis?
    - dianliang233 25d ago
      Re the first question, you have to park at least one wiki on said domain for around a year, during which Google will refuse to show other page other than the main page. That's just not really a realistic option is it.
      - 25d ago
mitxela 25d ago
miraheze.org?

KingMob 25d ago

This is a shame because Fandom is frequently terrible, but also consumes all the oxygen.

nephihaha 25d ago
It depends on which part. It is certainly heading down the same route as Wikipedia with all the problems that entails. You're usually better off on a smaller Fandom wiki as it won't have beeb taken over yet. The James Bond wiki is particularly bad, but Memory Alpha seems to be better run.
- einpoklum 25d ago
  > It is certainly heading down the same route as Wikipedia with all the problems that entails. Can you elaborate on what that means? i.e. what aspect of Wikipedia, and in what way Fandom is heading there?
  - nephihaha 24d ago
    The main issues I have are with the administration. I have noticed: * Admin enshittifying content that they have no knowledge or interest in. For example, I have witnessed admin trying to get articles about certain rugby union teams deleted, because they were amateur. (Before the 1990s all rugby union was officially amateur, and some notable clubs still are, especially in places like Argentina or Scotland, where professional clubs are not the norm.) They succeed in many cases. * Administrators may develop a particular dislike for a user, and their decisions may be based on that. I have witnessed personal vendettas and stalking behaviour from them. There are also cliques of friends and other conflicts of interest. Neither of these are professional if we are thinking purely in terms of content. Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, would get articles cross-checked by people who have an interest or a knowledge of that particular subject. I have seen quotations "corrected" on Wikipedia from their original wording. As for Fandom, it varies from site to site. Some are better than others. In recent years, Fandom has adopted some community guidelines which are questionable and are being applied across the board. Wikimedia did the same in a top-down power move with no mandate whatsoever. It was a fait accompli. Neither are better for it. The Broad Scots and Scottish Gaelic Wikipedias both have horrific administration issues, brought on partly by people correcting native speakers. The former created a minor international scandal in the media. The Greenlandic Wikipedia was hijacked by a German who ended up shutting it down. (He deleted other people's articles constantly, instead of improving the content and then wondered why he was the only person left in the room.) Either way, both remind me of the infinite monkey idea... Except those on the typewriter aren't even getting peanuts unless someone is paying them to write shill articles (and there are many of those.) I'm sure I'll be voted down for making these comments which is why I was reluctant to post earlier.

josephjrobison 25d ago

The bar has been raised on all web content for Google to index, esp new domains like you say but even some subdomains. That answer is quality content (higher than AI or human medians), links and pr and social activity and mentions, and then user experience.

watwut 25d ago
Google search results dont care about content quality. And did not for years already. It killed good quality blogs and sites long before the AI slop came in.
microtherion 25d ago
And yet, I have to dig my way through pages upon pages of AI trash sites for many Google queries. Somehow THOSE don’t seem to have a problem getting indexed (Maybe they run a sufficient number of ads?).
- willtemperley 25d ago
  Given none of the wikis pointed to in the article have ads, I'd say you're right.
charlieyu1 25d ago
Have they fixed the scam problem though?
basilikum 25d ago
Google may actively prefer AI slop over human quality content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc
- mitxela 25d ago
  Obviously Google uses AI to rate sites, because everyone uses AI for everything, and AI has been proven to rate AI-generated text higher than human-generated.

nephihaha 25d ago

Google has been removing blogs from its searches for years now. You have to search for them specifically. All part of the de-democratisation of the web.

mitxela 25d ago
Try Marginalia.

leonidasrup 25d ago

Courts should review past decisions Field v. Google, Inc. (2006) https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-and-Copyright-Law https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-a... Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. (2015) https://www.flaglerlawgroup.com/a-new-era-for-fair-use-court-changes-fair-use-law-in-google-decision/ https://www.flaglerlawgroup.com/a-new-era-for-fair-use-court...

mitxela 25d ago
It doesn't work like that. Past decisions don't get changed. If facts have changed you need a new decision.

skhameneh 25d ago

For a while, Fandom was having annoying ads and content that would get past my ad blocker. But a recent update has caused them to block users with ad blockers. I've been looking for explicit alternatives to Fandom for some content and it's annoyingly sparse. Just the other day I saw some meme about how if we saw as many ads taking over sites like we do now, that was a sure sign of having your machine getting infected with a virus. Generally I've found a good portion of websites that block users with ad blockers tend to be the worst offenders with aggressive ads...

nicce 25d ago
> Just the other day I saw some meme about how if we saw as many ads taking over sites like we do now, that was a sure sign of having your machine getting infected with a virus. That used to be the reality around decade ago for those who don’t know. Some applications changed the default front page of the browser, hijacked other websites to inject popups and so on
- AlAjem 25d ago
  >around decade ago Two decades now actually. By 2016 we were already seeing the mass transition to browsing on phones instead of PCs, Windows 10 was already out and for reasons I am not quite sure of the old homepage and toolbar hijackers were on the decline and adblockers were on the rise although I am sure there were still people using malware ridden Internet Explorers for years after. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_hijacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_hijacking
  - nicce 25d ago
    Ouch, already 11 years since the Windows 10 release.
    - mitxela 25d ago
      It really was the last Windows anyone with a brain would ever care about.

remedan 25d ago

I enjoy the this extension that redirects search results from Fandom and other such terrible hosts to their higher quality indie alternatives. https://github.com/IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy https://github.com/IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy

iamacyborg 25d ago
This is great for users, but it’s terrible for the SEO of those independent wikis as you’re telling Google you want to click on Fandom and Fextra links. /edit It appears this is no longer the case and the extension does things a lot better than it used to!
- maroider 25d ago
  That might be true for the default config in the extension, but you can also configure the extension to de-emphasize fandom wikis or outright hide them in search results. I don't quite remember the exact default config though.
  - Kayvanian 25d ago
    The default config is good for SEO, which is to re-order search results to put independent wikis above Fandom (driving clicks to the independent wiki), as well as disabling Fandom results + injecting a button to the indie wiki.
- Kayvanian 25d ago
  Indie Wiki Buddy re-orders search engine results to move independent wiki results above Fandom, driving clicks to the independent wiki. And for cases where the independent wiki doesn't show up, the Fandom result is disabled and a separate button is added that links directly to the independent wiki.
deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
opello 25d ago

LoganDark 25d ago

Anyone remember when "Fandom" was called Wikia? It really started going down the gutter when it started TikTokifying itself by trying to act as an entertainment hub. It was supposed to be a neutral resource for people to build community-driven knowledge bases but it turned into some real gamified garbage. I've never really been comfortable with the concept of addressing a "fandom" as one whole anyway, even in general, so the new act is just complete crap to me.

ButlerianJihad 25d ago
Fandom probably hosts more copyrighted images and media than the Internet Archive does. Entertainment studios can often turn a blind eye to use of their properties when it's by fans, for fans, and promotes those franchises. They are not sending C&D to people making avatars, or cosplaying, or memeing their screengrabs into notoriety. It is weird to think that the WMF and Wikia/Fandom had a common founder and origin.
pwdisswordfishq 25d ago
I remember when it was called Wikicities.
NobodyNada 25d ago
It was still crap back when it was Wikia. The website itself wasn't so bad yet, but the actual content of most Wikia wikis was very poor quality (often wrong, outdated, and/or poorly sourced; lack of maintenance and amateurish writing/presentation). I quickly learned to not click on Wikia search results whenever I could help it, whereas an independent wiki was a sign that the community cared enough to run their own servers. The only Wikia sites that had anything worthwhile were the ones that started as independent communities and got bought out, like Memory Alpha or the Minecraft wiki.
- LoganDark 24d ago
  I have nostalgia for real, community-driven crap. I have absolutely no nostalgia for this top-down systematic destruction of value.
24d ago

fergie 25d ago

I am slightly on the fence about this. If the goal is simply to provide a good platform for people to create and share information with each other, then it shouldn't matter if the wiki is indexed in Google or not, in fact "invisibility" might even increase the quality of contributions. OTOH if the goal is to monetize other people's contributions then yes, I totally get why the "Google jail" would be bad for that, but I'm just not sure that its a cause worth fighting for- that road basically leads to a new Fandom.

cookmeplox 25d ago
I think this logic falls apart if you realize that wikis only "work" when you're able to get some of the readers to turn into long-term contributors, and losing 90% of your traffic by not showing up on Google is a great way to kill that funnel. There's a ton of historical evidence of wiki migrations (1) starting out with all of the editors and none of the readers, (2) not doing anything to get those readers to the new site, and (3) ultimately losing the whole war because the reader->editor flow was still happening on the Fandom wiki. "Invisibility" is absolutely not desirable here, even if your only goal is maximizing the amount of good contributions.
- fergie 25d ago
  Yes, but the point is that maybe in 2026 we should be looking at ways to pay contributors/creators, rather than steal from them (slightly hyperbolic, but you get the gist)
  - philipwhiuk 25d ago
    The financialisation of all hobbies is extreemely toxic and that's what you're perpetuating here.
    - mitxela 25d ago
      Interestingly since people brought up the RuneScape wiki, RuneScape is a demonstration. They financialised the game around 2011, it went down the shitter, player numbers dropped, then plummeted once they turned it into a shitty WoW clone. They revived an old backup one day as an experiment and it grew to actually have 5 times more players than the enshittified original. It's not still running the backup - they've evolved it alongside the main game but with players having veto power over almost every single decision. Turns out they know what they like in the game, who knew.

jimnotgym 25d ago

I'm going to agree. I launched a website that is niche a few weeks ago, but totally unique. After a couple of weeks search console wakes up to tell me that they have indexed one page in 80. And that the top search term that is finding my site says exactly the name of one of my pages, yet Google is showing my homepage in search! Way to help your users

einpoklum 25d ago
> Way to help your users Dear Jim, At Google, our intent is to help our stockholders, not our users. Sincerely, Alphabet inc.
- phyzix5761 25d ago
  That's every company
  - sph 25d ago
    It’s not every company having the effective monopoly on what can be found (i.e. what exists) on the web.
    - phyzix5761 25d ago
      Every company is in it for the profits and benefits of its shareholders. Its idiotic to think that companies have benevolent intent toward their customers. If that wasn't the case they would go out of business.
      - latexr 25d ago
        Not every company is publicly traded, so they don’t have shares nor shareholders. Also, not every company is a massive behemoth who only cares about profit above all. Plenty of people start companies with the goal of providing something useful and good at fair prices and value their customer relationships. We should really stop with this cynical view that every company is run by greedy bastards who have active contempt for their customers and using it to excuse the behaviour of the worst offenders.

accountrequired 25d ago

Whatever that github wiki mirror is doing, try that. You know the one, always at the top of search results...

mitxela 25d ago
Deepwiki? The AI slop site?

deleted 25d ago

[deleted]

unglaublich 25d ago

> Subdomains of existing domains are totally fine Damn, another push to centralizing and walling off user content in 'fandoms', 'reddits' and other closed communities? Have the internet cards been handed out now, and are we in the end-game? Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?

captainbland 25d ago
It wouldn't surprise me. It seems like a mirror of the social media move from social graphs to recommendation engines. You are either producer or consumer and never shall consumer be promoted organically.
- anal_reactor 25d ago
  The answer is simple. Limit your time on social media the way you'd be limiting a child and focus on IRL interactions.
  - KingMob 25d ago
    Words of wisdom to heed. Thank you, user anal_reactor :‑D
    - anal_reactor 25d ago
      Stay open for more nuggets of wisdom!
  - captainbland 25d ago
    I also find IRL social interactions also want pacing to some degree. But I don't know, I find my brain is sort of wired for these sorts of novel, pseudonymous interactions from a young age.
    - anal_reactor 25d ago
      Yeah I get that. But treat them like candy - it's okay to eat a small dessert after lunch, it's okay to eat entire bucket of ice cream once in a while, but you know, your main diet needs to be quality stuff.

ahakoiro 25d ago

[flagged]

amazingamazing 25d ago

I am more confident fandom will exist than “weirdgloop”, 10 years from now. Who is laying the bills for weirdgloop? This does not say. From how it is written seems to be a one man show: https://weirdgloop.org/blog/why-were-helping-more-wikis-move-away-from-fandom#what-im-offering https://weirdgloop.org/blog/why-were-helping-more-wikis-move...

dianliang233 25d ago
They do ads on the RuneScape Wiki[1]. A couple of their wikis are also official wikis funded by game studios, such as Jagex for the RuneScape Wiki, Riot Games for Leagues, 2xko and Valorant, and Digital Extremes for Warframe. [1]: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis
sph 25d ago
I would bet $100 against your prediction. There are multiple game studios with their official wikis on weirdgloop's infra. Runescape players basically live off its wiki, it's that mandatory, and Jagex is well aware and OK with that.
- amazingamazing 24d ago
  How many are on fandom?
  - sph 24d ago
    How many are trying desperately to leave it?
    - amazingamazing 23d ago
      Very low percentage. Take a game of year like clair obscur. I will leave it as an exercise for you to see which wiki is biggest and most active.
deleted 25d ago
[deleted]

bariscan 25d ago

this is not only wiki, unfortunately google tries something at least for 6 months and "shadowing" is real thing. no manual action, no information, indexes here and valid; but no imp & clicks. make some social noise. signals has always good impact.

orbital-decay 25d ago
Google doesn't care. Even massive efforts with humongous communities behind them are ignored for years. Try an incognito tab with a random element from a random game, for example this Fallout 4 quest: https://www.google.com/search?q=Unlikely+Valentine https://www.google.com/search?q=Unlikely+Valentine Fandom, Reddit, IGN, Eurogamer, everything is on the front page except fallout.wiki which is where the community is now.
- EdwardDiego 25d ago
  Don't worry, the AI overview links to fallout.wiki... Seriously, it does, but I'm very much sarcastic when I say "don't worry".

SyneRyder 25d ago

Some of this might just be problems with the websites themselves. With the Path Of Exile 2 Wiki example, I'm looking at the sitemaps. Once you get through the first sitemap of nested sitemaps (ugh, not a fan of those), the very first actual sitemap returns: XML Parsing Error: no root element found Location: https://www.poe2wiki.net/sitemap/sitemap-poe_wiki-poe2_wiki--NS_0-0.xml Line Number 18040, Column 1 (EDIT: Of course, after I post this, it's now working again...) On to the Hytale Wiki example. I don't know if what I'm about to say applies to Google, but I'm approaching it from the perspective of my tiny dumb indieweb indexer for my personal search engine. It is much easier for me to index from a sitemap rather than try to crawl a website, so I basically look exclusively at sitemaps. Looking at Hytale Wiki, my process: * Site has a robots.txt file - good! * Robots.txt mentions a sitemap - excellent! * The sitemap is stored at /images/sitemaps/index.xml ... oh. I would usually not index anything from a /images/ folder, because I want to index pages only, not images. This would likely trip my exclusion filters. Let's ignore that and continue. * The sitemap is a list of an additional 26 nested Gzipped sitemaps. Oh. This is the point where my tiny dumb indexer would stop. Gzipped sitemaps are part of the standard, but they're relatively rare on the web for small sites. They typically only get used if a sitemap file exceeds the 50,000 pages-per-sitemap limit. In this case, 26 * 50,000 makes the HyTale Wiki look like a 1.3 Million page site. Do I really want to index 1.3 Million pages, an estimated 13GB of indexed text data, about a video game I'll probably never play? My search index is storage constrained, and my indexer is very time constrained. The time I spend indexing your site is time not spent indexing another, possibly higher quality website. So at this point, I'd just grab the front page and disappear... like Google apparently does too. Of course, the HyTale site isn't 1.3 Million pages, it's only 4,277 articles. That would all fit in the root sitemap file, and that might be the better approach for getting indexed.

SyneRyder 25d ago
Me again! I couldn't figure out why I was getting transient errors on that Poe2wiki sitemap, so I tried looking at other sitemaps on the site. I'm getting transient errors on all of them. Then I realized - the sitemap files are being overwritten in real time. Every edit on the Wiki is causing the sitemap file to be edited in real time. That's why the sitemaps sometimes stop right in the middle of a filename when I access it - the sitemap file is in the process of being rewritten. That's a behavior unique to a Wiki, and might explain the entire phenomenon.

arjie 25d ago

I host my blog etc. on Mediawiki. It has a bunch of defaults that make it not SEO friendly. I was absent from all search engines for a year and told a friend[0] how it was funny that I guess Google no longer ranks personal sites and he told me he’d look and see. It turned out that default Mediawiki stuff doesn’t do a lot of standard SEO stuff. I just did all of it. From the jsonld tags, to the meta description, to making sure the sitemaps were correct. As soon as I did, my site started showing up on Google. I cannot speak to these wikis’ problems but the first port of call for me would be checking that everything “standard” for this is now done. It’s just a reality of the web these days. I do get random traffic from Google now. Much less than I used to under the old regime in the 2000s but it feels more like a secular change than the flat zero listings I previously did. I wish I had kept track of everything so that one day I could say what I did but I just followed literally everything, including removing the index.php thing that Mediawiki uses by default. So I cannot even say which actions worked and which didn’t. I can’t even recall which changes to base I did do. Link rel canonical. A robots.txt that disables access to pages that accidentally duplicate content (e.g. permalink pages). Hard to tell. But the difference was stark 0 to hundreds of pages. Literally zero dude. And it happened weeks after the changes and very suddenly. 0: It’s not what he does as a job but he might remember https://www.jrhizor.dev/ https://www.jrhizor.dev/

sylware 25d ago

It is much much worse than that: the real jail is the "web javascript" of the web engines of the whatwg cartel, well roughly speaking.

HexPhantom 25d ago

The most interesting part here is that this isn't really an SEO problem anymore, it's a dependency problem

presango 25d ago

[flagged]

raincole 25d ago

When I still payed Dota, there was a wiki hosted on fandom. The experience was terrible. It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch, and on mobile there were so many ads rendering the whole thing unreadable. The catch is that there was a better wiki, called Liquipedia. But Google never showed it first and I kept getting tricked to click that shitty fandom site. (It was years ago. But I just tested it a bit and for most Dota-related keywords, fandom is still ranked higher than liquipedia. I don't know if the quality of fandom site has improved though.)

saghm 25d ago
Back when I played WoW, at some point the people running the fandom wiki "forked" it to move to different hosting, and I think even now years later the fandom one (which stopped receiving updates when the fork happened) is still ranked higher in Google searches
- plorkyeran 25d ago
  WoW is now on wiki number three after the company hosting the second one was also bought by fandom. The original rotting corpse is now over a decade out of date and still often ranks highest.
- jabroni_salad 24d ago
  Fandom also refused to give back the wowwiki.com domain. A mistake to ever let them manage it.
warmedcookie 25d ago
It's still terrible. Also, congrats on escaping the cancer.
jmuguy 25d ago
Yeah fandom has done this to several games. its taken a huge effort on the part of the Satisfactory community to make sure people know the official wiki is https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/ https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/ and not the garbage on fandom. Using an extension to block fandom.com results is helpful because for other games I'm not really thinking about it when searching for something and find myself on that tumor of a website.

alxfrnr 25d ago

It's not just for new wikis. It's called the Google sandbox in the SEO world and it's something that had been around for years and affects every new domain. New domains need to prove they can be trusted to get out of the sandbox and external links from trusted sources are the best way to do that and shorten the time spent in the sandbox. Big wikis like this go online with thousands of pages on a brand new domain. Without any external trust signal it just looks like spam for Google

mcv 25d ago

Or maybe we should all just stop using Google. If Google is widely known to be unable to find these fan wikis, maybe people will finally stop relying on Google.

JayNeely 25d ago

The article says this isn't an issue for subdomains of established domains, but the issues it describes match what we experienced setting up a game wiki for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint at https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/ https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/ -- almost a year of not having any pages show up in search results, even though we were getting good links to it and there were no better alternatives that should have ranked (we never started the wiki for this game on any centralized site; at most all they had for it was a placeholder page). Only after months of making sure our Steam news posts were consistently linking to pages within our wiki did we eventually see Google suddenly open the floodgates and start connecting searchers with the info they were searching for. I've built out highly-ranked content sites before, and none of what I'd learned from getting those started seemed to work with this wiki, for no apparent reason. Google Search Console showed plenty of pages on the wiki were indexed; it just wasn't displaying them. Seeing this post I fully believe the premise that there's simply an arbitrary Google Jail for independent wikis. That sucks for search quality.

mitxela 25d ago
The problem is that independent wikis don't pay the fandom tax to google for preferred search placement. Have you tried contacting your local corruption bureau to negotiate a rate tailored for your circumstances?
- panarky 25d ago
  Payment for search placement is not a thing.
  - nfriedly 24d ago
    I would assume they're referring to the advertisements that show up above (and barely distinguishable from) the search results.
  - recursive 24d ago
    It's not called that.

thataccount 25d ago

I stopped worrying about getting indexed by Google around 2008ish when it became apparent they were trying to impose their own rules on the internet and how things were found. Nowadays, I'm content to not have google index anything at all.

ethagnawl 25d ago

It'd be interesting to learn whether or not Gemini ignores them, too. I would guess not, as these sorts of sites tend to be founts of expert knowledge and insight.

wand3r 25d ago
Yeah same. I assume this is in response to LLM mass slop SEO hijacking or attempts to do LLM poisoning. It is a hard problem. New domains can launch every second with millions of words and pages. Unless you just moved an already existing wiki with thousands of pages and comments, it would definitely be "irregular" to have a millions of pages and content on a 1 month old site.

wizzwizz4 25d ago

As a workaround, the browser extension Indie Wiki Buddy (https://getindie.wiki https://getindie.wiki) will identify links to a relevant wiki in search results, and rewrite them to the wiki preferred by the community. It's quite useful.

numpad0 25d ago

Sounds like the same behavior as Twitter "shadowbans" in which you get severe visibility penalty after a jackpot. What would be the metric tied to this behavior?

johnnyApplePRNG 25d ago

It's essentially impossible to get any play at all from google search these days. Doesn't matter how legitimate or real your site, service, or project looks. Unless it's been online for at least 2 years, it's 99% probably AI slop spam and google would be risking their brand bending over backwards to try and index the majority of it. That's my take, anyway.

shadedtriangle 25d ago

This happened to my website about learning c++. I was posting new articles daily for a while there and traffic was slowly but steadily rising. Then one day traffic from search went straight to zero and never recovered. The whole project was designed to be Google searched first and not read like a book so that really killed my motivation back then.

gleipnircode 25d ago

Thanks for this article. Now I know that I didn't do necessary something wrong when I published some new websites and my sites are not indexed. Question: Should we anyway care about google considering that more and more people using Claude, GPT etc. for search? Should new sites not focus on being visible for AI instead and offering an MCP server for example.

zackmorris 25d ago

I feel like the currency of the future could be shame. Specifically, that a search engine competing with google could show how poorly each result was found by google, or even use lack of representation on google to rank a site more highly since it contains the truth for example. I also feel like shame correlates strongly with profit. That we're living in an era of lawless lack of accountability, where skirting the law for personal gain is rewarded handsomely. That anyone can make a deal with the devil and rise straight to the top, at least for now in the US until the political pendulum swings from liberty back towards justice.

tstrimple 25d ago

I recently started playing Palworld again with my son. The fan sites are simply terrible. Incomplete information and out of date. Tons of boilerplate nonsense that adds zero value. I used Claude Code to read the game data files and create a personal palworld wiki based on the data actually in the game. Pulled the in-game map assets to use as a foundation and linked between all the things which should have links. Look up a material and you can see all the Pals which drop it. Look up a Pal and you can see where they are found and all the things they drop, etc. Far, far more useful than any of the existing fan sites I found. I also did this with a far more obscure game which doesn't have nearly as much content online. Lucid Blocks. That game was weird AF and the systems didn't make any sense without tons of experimentation. I started by using CC as a journal for things I discovered to help try to build a coherent world view. Ended up just using CC to build a wiki for the game with all the entities and items based off of actual game data.

Catloafdev 25d ago

Google search has really gone to shit in this AI era. The decline has been steep and noticeable. It really makes me wonder what happened behind the scenes over there.

phyzome 25d ago
I regretfully added a Deny for Googlebot in my robots.txt this year. Never thought it would come to that.

zoobab 25d ago

I saw my personal website nearly dissapear from Google, because it is hosted on wikidot: http://zoobab.wikidot.com http://zoobab.wikidot.com Before my pages had a high ranking in Google.

ZeWaka 25d ago

We're experiencing this with my open-source game (SS13), can confirm.

amavect 25d ago

I'd like to plug the NIWA wiki network for Nintendo games. I think more independent wikis should federate in similar ways, to strategize beyond just search engine hits. https://www.niwanetwork.org/members/ https://www.niwanetwork.org/members/

dcchambers 24d ago

This is so frustrating. Fandom is a cancer on the web. Independent wikis are treasures. Google needs to fix this.

axionbraid 24d ago

[flagged]

thesuitonym 24d ago

This is not going to be the popular opinion but at this point, if your project is not for profit (As I assume most fan-made wikis are), I've found it's best to just ignore Google. Leads from Google are typically not good anyway, especially if what you're trying to build is some type of community. I understand that Weirdgloop is probably some kind of business, so it makes sense that they would care. And if you care, more power to you, I don't want to discourage anybody. I'm just out here promoting the idea that not everything you do has to be the next big thing. Sometimes it's okay to make a weird project and have only a handful of people care about it.

balder1991 24d ago
In fact it’s more important that the right people find it, and it could be linked in a profile etc.
cookmeplox 24d ago
"You shouldn't care about Google if you run a wiki" is really common take, and I think it's really harmful/wrong because it badly misunderstands the way that wiki communities actually form, and how losing all of the readers means you eventually don't have any editors. I talk about this more in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606772

pampas 24d ago

When the Google source code leaked it became clear a lot of the ranking boiled down to one big appeal to authority.