Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

weirdgloop.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 238 posts

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

#201

Post by chrismarlow9 »

walrus01 wrote: post #185
chrismarlow9 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private blog networks is another term in that side of the world. They're explicitly designed to look legit even to a human but give link juice to the spam world (which also look legit to a human). And the HN crowd say "I can spot an AI website a mile away!!!". Well cool, and good for you, but many people cannot. In fact, if you can, they are glad you are so smart and are leaving. Why? Because you wont convert. The ta…

I own a single English language dictionary word .net domain that is a common word related to lawsuits/legal activity and have been offered money to sell it. If I sell it, it will almost certainly become the front page of somebody's CRM lead generator for personal injury lawyers (or a blogspam site driving traffic to same through affiliate links). People who work in actual infrastructure building tech may not know or…

I dont know if I would discredit those folks as not knowing "actual infrastructure". The lengths I saw some folks go to get unique class C ip ranges and maintain automation is pretty impressive.

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

#202

Post by orbital-decay »

mitxela wrote: post #144
skhameneh wrote: post #10

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…

Which content? Maybe it's time for a Nitter for Fandom.

Not even a maybe... https://breezewiki.com/

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

#203

Post by SyneRyder »

jimnotgym wrote: post #179
swed420 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My incentive was merely to catalogue some historical things that were not catalogued elsewhere. Google, Wikipedia etc. LLMs knew only what was on Wikipedia. I don't mind that LLMs will find it....I used a bunch of agents to find sources for them and produce summaries of it, and even to build the site. It took a lot of human research too, but all my notes and snippets were sent to LLMs. I hope this means no more of th…

Neat idea for a website!

My tiny search indexer is going through now, and not finding any problems with indexing your site so far. If you see a Go program in your logs accessing with a 10 second delay between each page... hi! :D

Looking at your sitemap, I notice that only the front page (the one indexed page) has a priority of 1.0. Maybe experiment with making some other pages have a 1.0 priority as well, and see if that helps with indexing.

It's clear to me that much of the site was created & designed with an LLM, and that might be getting penalized. I imagine search engines are able to detect AI text and use that as a quality signal. For example, it's a big block of text under the Context & Sources section here, I think a human would break that up into paragraphs and use different phrasing.

https://murder-stones.org/stones/charlotte-dymond-memorial

Oh, and your Meta Descriptions are getting clipped, and clearly just the first words of the page. eg:

"Charlotte Dymond, an 18-year-old servant at Penhale Farm, was killed on Bodmin Moor by fellow servant Matthew Weekes after an argument; he confessed and was han"

Humanizing those descriptions could help too. Personally I hand-write the descriptions for every page on my sites, and try to make them look good for search engine display & helpful to humans.

It's also possible I have no clue what I'm talking about :) But I hope that helps!

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

#204

Post by flyinghamster »

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?

See also: any number of user-contributed sites that were bought by big players and basically parked. Does anyone even go to mp3.com for any real reason other than to see if anything has been done with it since the original was forced offline? I suspect they'll eventually unload it to someone who forks over enough money.

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

#205

Post by jimnotgym »

SyneRyder wrote: post #203
jimnotgym wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My incentive was merely to catalogue some historical things that were not catalogued elsewhere. Google, Wikipedia etc. LLMs knew only what was on Wikipedia. I don't mind that LLMs will find it....I used a bunch of agents to find sources for them and produce summaries of it, and even to build the site. It took a lot of human research too, but all my notes and snippets were sent to LLMs. I hope this means no more of th…

Neat idea for a website! My tiny search indexer is going through now, and not finding any problems with indexing your site so far. If you see a Go program in your logs accessing with a 10 second delay between each page... hi! :D Looking at your sitemap, I notice that only the front page (the one indexed page) has a priority of 1.0. Maybe experiment with making some other pages have a 1.0 priority as well, and see if…

Thanks. The problem was Google had not even crawled the other pages, so I don't think there was an LLM penalty!

I'll look into the priority, thanks.

The idea is for human research to slowly replace the LLM descriptions, hence all the boxes for submissions. I was going people might write up their local ones. I am hoping to get out and visit some myself, get proper photos, and write them up properly.

My first move was finding some to visit! I put all my early efforts into dicovery. The map itself was the important bit.

I asked Claude code to extend the meta descriptions since bing said they were too short, now I see it found a shortcut!

Thanks for taking a look.

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

#206

Post by jabroni_salad »

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

Fandom also refused to give back the wowwiki.com domain. A mistake to ever let them manage it.

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

#207

Post by jimnotgym »

SyneRyder wrote: post #194
jimnotgym wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're only concerned about Google, then that's probably all you need to / can do. It won't even matter to Google whether or not you put a "Sitemap:" line in your robots.txt if you submitted it directly with them. As for RSS, Google do regard RSS as another sitemap format. There's info here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... I would not submit an RSS file to Google as your sitemap, st…

Thank you. When I add the next updates (maybe that i found one of the objects on my site is on a military firing range!) I should add a news blog and RSS. Thanks

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

#208

Post by nfriedly »

panarky wrote: post #198
mitxela wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Payment for search placement is not a thing.

I would assume they're referring to the advertisements that show up above (and barely distinguishable from) the search results.

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

#209

Post by recursive »

panarky wrote: post #198
mitxela wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Payment for search placement is not a thing.

It's not called that.

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

#210

Post by LoganDark »

NobodyNada wrote: post #166
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 s…

I have nostalgia for real, community-driven crap. I have absolutely no nostalgia for this top-down systematic destruction of value.
Post reply on HN