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

weirdgloop.org

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

#111

Post by viraptor »

KingMob wrote: post #79
SyneRyder wrote: post #69

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…

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.

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".

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

#112

Post by saghm »

latexr wrote: post #78
phyzix5761 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 contem…

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.

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

#113

Post by sph »

amazingamazing wrote: post #58

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...

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.

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

#114

Post by pndy »

rob74 wrote: post #27
nephihaha wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

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

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

#116

Post by jmuguy »

raincole wrote: post #100

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…

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.

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

#117

Post by JayNeely »

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.

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

#118

Post by yreg »

dianliang233 wrote: post #89
yreg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overwa…

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

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.

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

#119

Post by flexagoon »

latexr wrote: post #78
phyzix5761 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 contem…

> Not every company is publicly traded, so they don’t have shares nor shareholders

They do, they're just not publicly traded. Private companies still have owners and investors.

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

#120

Post by wink »

KingMob wrote: post #5

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

Things change. I'd been involved with some game wikis long enough ago that moving there was a good idea (if you had no one who wanted to do server admin and no hw/vps sponsors)
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