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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

#161

Post by port11 »

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…

Fandom is an abomination and filled with irrelevant or very basic content for most games. It wouldn’t exist if not for its phenomenal ranking on game-related searches…

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

#163

Post by TFNA »

anal_reactor wrote: post #146
TFNA wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Travel. It's cheaper than ever.

This response sounds like "let them eat cake". You realize a lot of people on the internet (even here on HN) are in the developing world and, whether due to lack of means or weak passports, can't necessarily travel to where the things that interest them can be found locally?

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

#164

Post by phyzix5761 »

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…

Every company has at least 1 shareholder. In some categorizations shareholders are called members but its the same function. But, who said companies are run by greedy bastards? Every company tries to make profits so they can continue their business, otherwise they would go bankrupt. If someone starts a venture with the goal of providing a good or service for no profit we have a classification for that. Its called a non profit.

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

#165

Post by phyzome »

Catloafdev wrote: post #162

Google search has really gone to shit in this AI era. The decline has been steep and noticeable. It really makes me wonder what happened behind the scenes over there.

I regretfully added a Deny for Googlebot in my robots.txt this year. Never thought it would come to that.

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

#166

Post by NobodyNada »

LoganDark wrote: post #17

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…

It was still crap back when it was Wikia. The website itself wasn't so bad yet, but the actual content of most Wikia wikis was very poor quality (often wrong, outdated, and/or poorly sourced; lack of maintenance and amateurish writing/presentation). I quickly learned to not click on Wikia search results whenever I could help it, whereas an independent wiki was a sign that the community cared enough to run their own servers.

The only Wikia sites that had anything worthwhile were the ones that started as independent communities and got bought out, like Memory Alpha or the Minecraft wiki.

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

#167

Post by plorkyeran »

saghm wrote: post #104
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…

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

WoW is now on wiki number three after the company hosting the second one was also bought by fandom. The original rotting corpse is now over a decade out of date and still often ranks highest.

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

#168

Post by ranger_danger »

port11 wrote: post #161
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…

Fandom is an abomination and filled with irrelevant or very basic content for most games. It wouldn’t exist if not for its phenomenal ranking on game-related searches…

Sometimes a fandom site I come across is legitimate and has tons of great information, and other times they completely make up fake games or features and just act like it was always real.

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

#169

Post by charcircuit »

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…

>It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch

In case you didn't know Fandom is not the one who is writing the wiki. The pages are community contributed. If it's out of date it means no one has contributed information about newer patches.

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

#170

Post by jimnotgym »

SyneRyder wrote: post #56
jimnotgym wrote: post #22

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

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…

Sitemap was submitted and search console says it is good on day one.

Robots.txt is in place

I think of RSS as more of a bloggers tool...am I thinking of this wrong.

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