71–80 of 237 posts
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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.
It's two english words both of which have negative conotations?
> 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?
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
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 c…
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.
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…
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.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...
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 c…
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 ac…
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/
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…
That's ignoring how video game wikis are used. People will google " " and completely miss the wiki. Or " ". 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 " wiki" after seeing a link to it on reddit. When the reason is to…
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.
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It’s not every company having the effective monopoly on what can be found (i.e. what exists ) on the web.
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.
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.
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 c…
I would expect Google to handle broken or missing sitemaps, honestly.
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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.
The answer is simple. Limit your time on social media the way you'd be limiting a child and focus on IRL interactions.