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

Posted by pizzaiolo 11 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by JayNeely 8 minutes 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/ -- 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.

Comment by raincole 50 minutes 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.)

Comment by jmuguy 9 minutes 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/ 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.

Comment by saghm 37 minutes 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

Comment by warmedcookie 30 minutes ago

It's still terrible. Also, congrats on escaping the cancer.

Comment by SyneRyder 2 hours 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.

Comment by SyneRyder 2 hours 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.

Comment by masklinn 2 hours ago

Makes sense. Whatever generates those site maps should use the classic Unix trick of writing a separate file then renaming. Also maybe don’t update lastmods on each individual update, it’s a waste of resources since the granularity of lastmod is usually the day (though you can make it the second if you want).

Comment by HexPhantom 1 hour ago

Though weirdly it makes the subdomain result even more interesting: presumably those wikis are rewriting their sitemaps too, yet Google manages to index them normally

Comment by dianliang233 1 hour ago

There's no need to speculate on whether the sitemap is received correctly by Google since Google Search Console tells you how many pages it can discover from the sitemap you submitted.

Comment by iamacyborg 1 hour ago

The poe2wiki issue is a little different to what is documented, albeit only for the last few months, previously we certainly had visibility issues.

The recent issues relate to site errors due to aggressive crawling of uncached, server-intensive pages (diffs, etc) hidden behind residential proxies. We were being hit sufficiently hard that the server had stability issues and we were penalised by Google.

Comment by HexPhantom 1 hour ago

The sitemap issues are definitely worth fixing, but I don't think they explain the most interesting part: the same kind of wiki seems to behave very differently depending on whether it's on a fresh root domain or an established subdomain.

Comment by KingMob 2 hours ago

This is all valid critique, but I have great difficulty believing Google's crawler behaves anything like yours.

I would expect Google to handle broken or missing sitemaps, honestly.

Comment by viraptor 28 minutes ago

I wish. Not only do they sometimes randomly fail, Google search console will not tell your why. I've got a site with a sitemap which passes in every validator I could find, yet Google doesn't read it and GSC just reports "error" without any details. Google is big enough to go "we don't care, it's your problem".

Comment by shuwix 1 hour ago

[dead]

Comment by unglaublich 4 hours 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?

Comment by walrus01 2 hours ago

> Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?

This has been a thing for a long time in domain name resale for speculation or link farming or similar, domains that are aged with "backlinks" sell for more money.

https://www.google.com/search?&q=domain+resale+backlinks

Comment by captainbland 3 hours 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.

Comment by HexPhantom 1 hour ago

Search used to feel more like infrastructure: put something useful on the web, link to it, and eventually people could find it

Comment by anal_reactor 3 hours ago

The answer is simple. Limit your time on social media the way you'd be limiting a child and focus on IRL interactions.

Comment by TFNA 1 hour ago

What if I want to spend my time discussing things that are not represented in my geographical region?

Comment by captainbland 1 hour 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.

Comment by KingMob 2 hours ago

Words of wisdom to heed. Thank you, user anal_reactor :‑D

Comment by jeanmichelselli 3 hours ago

I couldn't agree more with this comment!

Comment by HexPhantom 1 hour ago

The really perverse bit is that this rewards exactly the kind of consolidation Google's anti-spam changes are presumably meant to fight

Comment by Ygg2 3 hours ago

That or Google is getting so unusable even Discord is a better search engine.

Comment by Perz1val 3 hours ago

Not the end, just google bleeding itself out as a search engine while LLMs take over. Chatgpt often links me random, actually decent sites that I wouldn't have gotten from a simple google search on first page, because it would've been exclusively seo slop

Comment by bityard 2 hours ago

ChapGPT (and all other hosted L To me) still use a search engine behind the scenes whenever you ask a question. Often, it uses those seo slop sites as primary sources when formulating an answer. Which is why, even though hallucinations are now somewhat rare these days, you _still_ should independently verify their output for anything important.

Comment by remedan 6 hours 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

Comment by iamacyborg 5 hours 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!

Comment by maroider 5 hours 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.

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by arjie 2 hours 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/

Comment by skhameneh 7 hours 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...

Comment by Suzuran 50 minutes ago

My mother was looking for cheat codes for some video game she was playing and she ended up on Fandom. I had installed uBlock Origin for her because she had a history of being victimized by malware. Fandom detected it and served her the "BLOCKING ADS IS STEALING FROM YOUR FELLOW FANS!" scare stuff, with instructions for removing uBO. She followed the instructions because she thought that's what she needed to do to access the information, and Fandom immediately served her ransomware.

Comment by nkrisc 3 hours ago

Given that these ad networks have actually served real malware on normally trustworthy sites (even nytimes was affected) the meme is essentially true even today.

Ad blockers are malware protection.

Comment by latexr 2 hours ago

Even the FBI warned about that.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...

Comment by dspillett 3 hours ago

> Generally I've found a good portion of websites that block users with ad blockers tend to be the worst offenders with aggressive ads...

It is a common cycle: as they get more aggressive with trying to make the ad based business model work, more and more people are pushed to installing blockers. At this point there is a choice: find a less crappy business model (not an easy task, many have failed) or double down and get more iffy with the adverts and who you partner with to serve them. Eventually it gets to a point where such a high proportion or the viewers are using blockers and the next step in ads/stalking is a step too far even for them, and then the blocker blocking attempts start.

Comment by nicce 5 hours 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

Comment by AlAjem 4 hours 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

Comment by nicce 4 hours ago

Ouch, already 11 years since the Windows 10 release.

Comment by kotaKat 5 hours ago

> But a recent update has caused them to block users with ad blockers.

I'm noticing that Ad-Shield is becoming a continual fight these days with pageloads that complete then they fly in with a "ha ha here's a fake error report turn off your adblocker aye?".

Every time their live support chat is open (why would the anti-adblock firm even offer one), I send them Goatse.

Comment by dspillett 3 hours ago

> Every time their live support chat is open […], I send them Goatse.

Unfortunately there is little chance that a human is anywhere near the other end of that chat these days, so your evil is somewhat wasted.

> (why would the anti-adblock firm even offer one)

They want to appear to care. And appear to be a company of real people, who you might like if you met in real life, who will be out of pocket if you don't look at their ads.

Comment by IanCal 2 hours ago

If there is a person on the other end it’s not someone who has any link to the company, they’ll be an outsourced service, so all you’d be doing is sending graphic porn to a poorly paid worker.

It’s like screaming at a cashier because the supermarket head office made annoying changes to the company.

Comment by alxfrnr 32 minutes 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

Comment by mcv 10 minutes 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.

Comment by jimnotgym 6 hours 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

Comment by mrweasel 6 hours ago

Yet you can be absolutely sure that Google is training their AI products on the same pages they do not want to show to their search users.

Comment by swed420 39 minutes ago

In recent years I've thought about making blogs, videos, etc to share knowledge, but the incentive is just no longer there. Even before AI, youtube/web search/etc had plenty of problems, and now they're compounded.

Comment by SyneRyder 3 hours ago

Have you added a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml, even an RSS file?

While I don't know if this will help with Google, I have my own tiny dumb search indexer, and a sitemap is by far the easiest way for me to index an entire website. I'll discover the sitemap from reading your robots.txt file. RSS helps too, but my indexer uses that mostly to find fresh pages without going through your entire sitemap again. I know Kagi's tiny Teclis indexer also uses RSS files for discovery for their indie web index.

Comment by einpoklum 6 hours ago

> Way to help your users

Dear Jim,

At Google, our intent is to help our stockholders, not our users.

Sincerely,

Alphabet inc.

Comment by phyzix5761 6 hours ago

That's every company

Comment by sph 5 hours ago

It’s not every company having the effective monopoly on what can be found (i.e. what exists) on the web.

Comment by phyzix5761 2 hours 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.

Comment by latexr 2 hours 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.

Comment by saghm 27 minutes ago

I don't totally disagree with you, but although I loathe the "public companies are legally required to maximize profits above all else" meme, I do think that it's where to companies tend to end to in the absence of other factors, and those other factors tend to be fairly rare for public companies. That's why I view the solution to a company causing more harm to be regulation; the alternative is just trusting them to do better and self-police, which seems like a poor strategy if you already think that a company is causing harm and not doing anything about it.

Obviously people will disagree with how much harm is enough to be worth regulating, and I'm not trying to make a claim here about whether it's necessary for what we're talking about around search results. My point is that the fact that public companies can theoretically put social good above profits doesn't really change the fact that in practice few do, and the common pattern is worth taking into account.

Comment by miladyincontrol 8 hours 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.

Comment by cookmeplox 6 hours 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)

Comment by accountrequired 5 hours ago

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

Comment by HexPhantom 1 hour ago

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

Comment by rao-v 8 hours 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

Comment by copper-float 6 hours 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.

Comment by cookmeplox 6 hours 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.

Comment by sph 32 minutes ago

> it's literally just named after a random item in RuneScape I discovered

Well, at least you didn't go with fossilised dung.

https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Fossilised_dung

Comment by yreg 4 hours 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?

Comment by dianliang233 1 hour 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.

Comment by yreg 1 hour ago

Per the article they don't.

> There’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, though - based on our experiments so far, it seems like once we establish these new wikis fairly well on Google, it should be safe to move them off weirdgloop.org back to whatever the appropriate name was, while keeping the existing Google juice that the subdomain picked up. I’m hoping that in 6 months or so we can just 301 redirect overwatch.weirdgloop.org to overwatch.wiki, use Google’s change of address tool, and put these wikis to where they should have been in the first place.

Comment by dianliang233 1 hour ago

I mean, at that point isn't it better for the community to just leave the wiki on overwatch.wiki instead of overwatch.<generic domain>?

Comment by yreg 2 minutes ago

For the hardcore Overwatch community perhaps, but not for the general gaming community, especially if WG is about to grow further and host more and more wikis.

For people who regularly get into new games its much easier to learn just one easily distinguished domain with the high quality wikis.

overwatch.weirdgloop.org works better than overwatch.wiki in this sense, apart from the complaints about the odd name up in the comment chain.

Comment by Shank 4 hours ago

The domain is suboptimal. The group is great!

Comment by TylerE 5 hours ago

It's two english words both of which have negative conotations?

Comment by deaddodo 2 hours ago

"gloop" is a neutral/funny word. The adjective "weird" is what makes it somewhat negative.

Comment by fakwandi_priv 7 hours ago

What’s wrong with wiki.gg?

Comment by iamacyborg 5 hours ago

Tons of ads.

Comment by dreadpiratewiki 6 hours 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

Comment by 6thsurvivor 33 minutes 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

Comment by josephjrobison 7 hours 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.

Comment by microtherion 6 hours 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?).

Comment by willtemperley 2 hours ago

Given none of the wikis pointed to in the article have ads, I'd say you're right.

Comment by basilikum 1 hour ago

Google may actively prefer AI slop over human quality content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc

Comment by charlieyu1 4 hours ago

Have they fixed the scam problem though?

Comment by watwut 6 hours 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.

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by KingMob 8 hours ago

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

Comment by sph 30 minutes ago

Fun fact: Fandom was co-founded by Jimmy Wales

"On February 4, 2026, Jay Sullivan was named the new CEO. In a public statement following the arrival of Fandom's new CEO, the company's president, Jimmy Wales, mentioned that they intend to incorporate additional AI tools into Fandom Wikis to adapt to internet searches". No comment.

Comment by rob74 6 hours ago

One hand washes the other: they buy ads from Google (I think), so Google prefers them in the indexing process, so they get more traffic, so Google prefers them even more.

Comment by nephihaha 7 hours 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.

Comment by pndy 3 hours ago

> Memory Alpha seems to be better run.

Some few months ago I couldn't find actors credits for particular roles they had in Star Trek franchise. For whatever reasons these bits were removed but still were present within Wayback Machine.

Then again, in the past I've seen hostile take-overs of fan made wikis into wikia/fandom "infrastructure". In one case wiki was copied, in time articles were slightly edited and new content was added containing... unsolicited fan theories.

The other case: wiki was copied 1:1 due to some inside disagreements, then incorporated into fandom and in approx. 2 years abandoned. The original died as well but someone managed to restore it from Wayback - this time in read-only mode

Comment by rob74 6 hours ago

Well at least Wikipedia doesn't pester you with tons of ads that sometimes make it hard to even find the content (except for the occasional donation banner, but that's a minor annoyance compared to what Fandom does).

Comment by pndy 23 minutes ago

There were memes ridiculing Wales and all that annual effort regarding supporting Wikipedia - probably that did the job

Comment by thaumasiotes 5 hours ago

> except for the occasional donation banner, but that's a minor annoyance compared to what Fandom does

Well, I guess that's true.

It's worth noting, though, that wikipedia's donation demands cover more than the entire screen on a phone.

Comment by account42 5 hours ago

It's also worth noting that both Wikipedia and Fandom were co-founded by Jimmy Wales.

Comment by thaumasiotes 5 hours ago

Well... why? Is he involved with either of them now? Is there a shared persisting influence of some kind?

Comment by einpoklum 6 hours 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?

Comment by bariscan 3 hours 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.

Comment by orbital-decay 48 minutes 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

Fandom, Reddit, IGN, Eurogamer, everything is on the front page except fallout.wiki which is where the community is now.

Comment by EdwardDiego 37 minutes 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".

Comment by nephihaha 7 hours 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.

Comment by LoganDark 6 hours 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.

Comment by pwdisswordfishq 54 minutes ago

I remember when it was called Wikicities.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 6 hours 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.

Comment by sylware 2 hours 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.

Comment by amazingamazing 3 hours 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...

Comment by sph 26 minutes 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.

Comment by dianliang233 1 hour 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

Comment by presango 1 hour ago

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Comment by ahakoiro 4 hours ago

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Comment by robin0716 11 hours ago

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Comment by leonidasrup 7 hours ago

Courts should review past decisions

Field v. Google, Inc. (2006)

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...

Comment by fergie 6 hours 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.

Comment by tuetuopay 5 hours ago

That's ignoring how video game wikis are used. People will google "<game> <place where I'm stuck>" and completely miss the wiki. Or "<game> <mechanic>". Etc. So reachability and proper indexing by search engines is a must.

I've hit this on a few wikis where, for some (at the time inexplicable) reason, I'd get only the crappy Fandom wiki with above queries, and a good wiki when searching only for "<game> wiki" after seeing a link to it on reddit.

When the reason is to move away from Fandom, get people what they are looking for, and perhaps attract contributors, this is an issue. Your average gamer won't route through the Wiki's main page, rather rely on the top Google search result for their issue.

Comment by billyp-rva 2 hours ago

> That's ignoring how video game wikis are used. People will google "<game> <place where I'm stuck>" and completely miss the wiki. Or "<game> <mechanic>". Etc. So reachability and proper indexing by search engines is a must.

Well, it's a "must" because over the years people have been trained to do this, instead of going directly to a quality website they trust. However, this has also trained website owners to neglect their brand and focus only on SEO, leading to the ad-infested wiki sites we have today.

Google went through all of this many (many) years ago with the "content farm" problem, so this is nothing new, really.

Comment by cookmeplox 6 hours 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.

Comment by fergie 3 hours 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)

Comment by philipwhiuk 1 hour ago

The financialisation of all hobbies is extreemely toxic and that's what you're perpetuating here.

Comment by jdranczewski 6 hours ago

I think it's fair to say that if the wiki's intent is to share information with people, you want people (and not just the inner circle of those in the know) to be able to find it. And the way most people find things is on Google.

Comment by sersi 5 hours ago

Personally I liked it 10 years ago when I searched for something and Google actually delivered useful results that were related to what I was searching. Nowadays, when I search for anything, I mostly get blogspam, ai slop and useless articles or in the very best scenario, good content on a page infested with ads (luckily there's ublock origin).

So yeah, when my goal is to search for content that would be in a wiki, I'm ecstatic when I get an independent wiki over fandom. The Google Jail is the opposite of what I'd want.

Nowadays, I use Kagi which is better than Google but it's still not to the level of Google in 2010.