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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

#211

Post by alightsoul »

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…

There's some sort of reranking, maybe this is how they measure site reputation now? By linking from a large website and people in that website like it? Or SEO?

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

#212

Post by alightsoul »

mitxela wrote: post #134
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.

But it's paid. Some people use brave because it's free and not google. More than duckduckgo

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

#213

Post by overfeed »

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…

> That sucks for search quality.

I was shocked to see Google's AI panel show my niece Bluey fan-fiction[1] as authoritative fact, sourced from an wiki (may have been a fandom wiki, IIRC).

Independent wikis have variable quality, pagerank isn't enough to gate the quality.

1. The infobox showed Mackenzie's full name as "Mackenzie Heeler", based on fanfic about grown-up Mackenzie marrying Bluey and taking up her last name. It also included names of their made-up kids.

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

#215

Post by amazingamazing »

sph wrote: post #113
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.

How many are on fandom?

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

#217

Post by thesuitonym »

This is not going to be the popular opinion but at this point, if your project is not for profit (As I assume most fan-made wikis are), I've found it's best to just ignore Google. Leads from Google are typically not good anyway, especially if what you're trying to build is some type of community.

I understand that Weirdgloop is probably some kind of business, so it makes sense that they would care. And if you care, more power to you, I don't want to discourage anybody. I'm just out here promoting the idea that not everything you do has to be the next big thing. Sometimes it's okay to make a weird project and have only a handful of people care about it.

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

#219

Post by gopher_space »

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’ll still catch myself thinking this way even though The Great Disillusionment was like twenty years ago.

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

#220

Post by balder1991 »

thesuitonym wrote: post #217

This is not going to be the popular opinion but at this point, if your project is not for profit (As I assume most fan-made wikis are), I've found it's best to just ignore Google. Leads from Google are typically not good anyway, especially if what you're trying to build is some type of community. I understand that Weirdgloop is probably some kind of business, so it makes sense that they would care. And if you care, m…

In fact it’s more important that the right people find it, and it could be linked in a profile etc.
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