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]

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/