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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

#131

Post by xerox13ster »

opello wrote: post #121
remedan wrote: post #16

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

That's interesting. Some of the fandom wikis are really high quality (memory-alpha, starwars) and were my introduction to the service. I suppose I appreciate that someone paying for the hosting and running the wiki has to be paid for somehow. And this kind of consolidation makes it worse if the underlying provider fails, but ideally avoids that so individually hosted instances don't more silently disappear. It makes…

The user contributions may be high-quality but the site they are on is so low quality that I find the information to be of lower quality. I don’t care how well filled out it is: if the site is bad then the information is not worth my time.

I say this as a Star Trek fan.

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

#132

Post by lithos »

no_wizard wrote: post #126
jmuguy wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shoutout to Kagi search for having a deny list feature. It’s really nice for this sort of thing.

Google used to have a deny/block list. But such lists are obviously very advertising unfriendly, since the companies paying for placement and running the most ads are most likely to be blocked.

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

#133

Post by mitxela »

JayNeely wrote: post #117

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 start…

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?

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

#134

Post by mitxela »

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…

This is why people recommend Kagi.

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

#135

Post by mitxela »

lithos wrote: post #132
no_wizard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoutout to Kagi search for having a deny list feature. It’s really nice for this sort of thing.

Google used to have a deny/block list. But such lists are obviously very advertising unfriendly, since the companies paying for placement and running the most ads are most likely to be blocked.

They have one, it's just centralised and blocks the good sites.

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

#136

Post by johnnyApplePRNG »

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.

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

#137

Post by marcosdumay »

unglaublich wrote: post #47

> 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?

> Have the internet cards been handed out now, and are we in the end-game?

The big companies are trying to corral and kill everybody else, yes.

That's not some "end-game", though. It's just powerful anti-social entities doing their thing while society refuses to punish them.

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

#138

Post by mitxela »

HexPhantom wrote: post #94
SyneRyder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

If the site is tripping a Google filter it makes sense that it eventually gets manually overridden. That's assuming good faith on Google's part.

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

#139

Post by mitxela »

walrus01 wrote: post #70
unglaublich wrote: post #47

> 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?

> 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

IP addresses too. Everyone who trades IP blocks pays a premium for ones that haven't been used for spamming in a long time, so they can be the first in a long time to use them for spamming.

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

#140

Post by mitxela »

TFNA wrote: post #85
anal_reactor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Start a club in your geographical region.
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