It wouldn't surprise me. It seems like a mirror of the social media move from social graphs to recommendation engines. You are either producer or consumer and never shall consumer be promoted organically.
Not the end, just google bleeding itself out as a search engine while LLMs take over. Chatgpt often links me random, actually decent sites that I wouldn't have gotten from a simple google search on first page, because it would've been exclusively seo slop
This is great for users, but it’s terrible for the SEO of those independent wikis as you’re telling Google you want to click on Fandom and Fextra links.
/edit
It appears this is no longer the case and the extension does things a lot better than it used to!
That might be true for the default config in the extension, but you can also configure the extension to de-emphasize fandom wikis or outright hide them in search results. I don't quite remember the exact default config though.
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 with a virus.
Generally I've found a good portion of websites that block users with ad blockers tend to be the worst offenders with aggressive ads...
> Generally I've found a good portion of websites that block users with ad blockers tend to be the worst offenders with aggressive ads...
It is a common cycle: as they get more aggressive with trying to make the ad based business model work, more and more people are pushed to installing blockers. At this point there is a choice: find a less crappy business model (not an easy task, many have failed) or double down and get more iffy with the adverts and who you partner with to serve them. Eventually it gets to a point where such a high proportion or the viewers are using blockers and the next step in ads/stalking is a step too far even for them, and then the blocker blocking attempts start.
Given that these ad networks have actually served real malware on normally trustworthy sites (even nytimes was affected) the meme is essentially true even today.
> 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 with a virus.
That used to be the reality around decade ago for those who don’t know. Some applications changed the default front page of the browser, hijacked other websites to inject popups and so on
Two decades now actually. By 2016 we were already seeing the mass transition to browsing on phones instead of PCs, Windows 10 was already out and for reasons I am not quite sure of the old homepage and toolbar hijackers were on the decline and adblockers were on the rise although I am sure there were still people using malware ridden Internet Explorers for years after.
> But a recent update has caused them to block users with ad blockers.
I'm noticing that Ad-Shield is becoming a continual fight these days with pageloads that complete then they fly in with a "ha ha here's a fake error report turn off your adblocker aye?".
Every time their live support chat is open (why would the anti-adblock firm even offer one), I send them Goatse.
> Every time their live support chat is open […], I send them Goatse.
Unfortunately there is little chance that a human is anywhere near the other end of that chat these days, so your evil is somewhat wasted.
> (why would the anti-adblock firm even offer one)
They want to appear to care. And appear to be a company of real people, who you might like if you met in real life, who will be out of pocket if you don't look at their ads.
If there is a person on the other end it’s not someone who has any link to the company, they’ll be an outsourced service, so all you’d be doing is sending graphic porn to a poorly paid worker.
It’s like screaming at a cashier because the supermarket head office made annoying changes to the company.
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!
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 tiny Teclis indexer also uses RSS files for discovery for their indie web index.
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.
I dont know about this, I've been heading a wiki for a rather specific niche that was made about 1.5 years ago and it easily got most top results for it's focus in just a few months.
It sounds like the issue isnt for "independent wikis" but for wikis competing with an existing domain already hosting one on the topic, in this case fandom.com's.
What's the wiki? I'm always interested to get more data points on this, because it has definitely applied to wikis for brand new topics that aren't competing with anything on Fandom (it's not the same as the normal "duplicate content penalty" that people talk about)
this is not only wiki, unfortunately google tries something at least for 6 months and "shadowing" is real thing. no manual action, no information, indexes here and valid; but no imp & clicks.
make some social noise. signals has always good impact.
As a bandaid solution we probably just need a good base domain for game wikis attached to a somewhat trustworthy foundation (that won’t sellout to Fandom in a week). Agree that wierdgloop.org is not … great
What's wrong with weird gloop? The RuneScape wikis are very high quality, same with the Minecraft wiki. Cook and others running are transparent and seem to have good intentions.
I think you can love what we're doing with the wikis, but also be candid that it's not an optimal reader-facing domain name. It was never really intended to be that - it's literally just named after a random item in RuneScape I discovered
But it ended up being the only reasonable place we owned where we could put Fortnite, Overwatch and Valheim wikis that wouldn't get crushed by this new Google jail situation. Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first. Chicken and egg.
> Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first.
So why not get such domain, wait out until it is let out of Google Jail and then put all the wikis on subdomains?
I imagine you would quickly gain trust and people would immediately recognize the links and know that this is the place to go. As opposed to the current state where the wikis have separate domain names and for each game we need to learn which one is the "good one".
⸻
Second question: Any thoughts on liberating non-gaming wikis from fandom, such as TV show wikis?
And yet, I have to dig my way through pages upon pages of AI trash sites for many Google queries. Somehow THOSE don’t seem to have a problem getting indexed (Maybe they run a sufficient number of ads?).
Google search results dont care about content quality. And did not for years already. It killed good quality blogs and sites long before the AI slop came in.
One hand washes the other: they buy ads from Google (I think), so Google prefers them in the indexing process, so they get more traffic, so Google prefers them even more.
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.
Some few months ago I couldn't find actors credits for particular roles they had in Star Trek franchise. For whatever reasons these bits were removed but still were present within Wayback Machine.
Then again, in the past I've seen hostile take-overs of fan made wikis into wikia/fandom "infrastructure". In one case wiki was copied, in time articles were slightly edited and new content was added containing... unsolicited fan theories.
The other case: wiki was copied 1:1 due to some inside disagreements, then incorporated into fandom and in approx. 2 years abandoned. The original died as well but someone managed to restore it from Wayback - this time in read-only mode
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).
Google has been removing blogs from its searches for years now. You have to search for them specifically. All part of the de-democratisation of the web.
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, so the new act is just complete crap to me.
Fandom probably hosts more copyrighted images and media than the Internet Archive does.
Entertainment studios can often turn a blind eye to use of their properties when it's by fans, for fans, and promotes those franchises. They are not sending C&D to people making avatars, or cosplaying, or memeing their screengrabs into notoriety.
It is weird to think that the WMF and Wikia/Fandom had a common founder and origin.
I am slightly on the fence about this. If the goal is simply to
provide a good platform for people to create and share information
with each other, then it shouldn't matter if the wiki is indexed in
Google or not, in fact "invisibility" might even increase the quality
of contributions.
OTOH if the goal is to monetize other people's contributions then yes,
I totally get why the "Google jail" would be bad for that, but I'm
just not sure that its a cause worth fighting for- that road basically
leads to a new Fandom.
That's ignoring how video game wikis are used. People will google "<game> <place where I'm stuck>" and completely miss the wiki. Or "<game> <mechanic>". Etc. So reachability and proper indexing by search engines is a must.
I've hit this on a few wikis where, for some (at the time inexplicable) reason, I'd get only the crappy Fandom wiki with above queries, and a good wiki when searching only for "<game> wiki" after seeing a link to it on reddit.
When the reason is to move away from Fandom, get people what they are looking for, and perhaps attract contributors, this is an issue. Your average gamer won't route through the Wiki's main page, rather rely on the top Google search result for their issue.
I think this logic falls apart if you realize that wikis only "work" when you're able to get some of the readers to turn into long-term contributors, and losing 90% of your traffic by not showing up on Google is a great way to kill that funnel.
There's a ton of historical evidence of wiki migrations (1) starting out with all of the editors and none of the readers, (2) not doing anything to get those readers to the new site, and (3) ultimately losing the whole war because the reader->editor flow was still happening on the Fandom wiki. "Invisibility" is absolutely not desirable here, even if your only goal is maximizing the amount of good contributions.
Yes, but the point is that maybe in 2026 we should be looking at ways to pay contributors/creators, rather than steal from them (slightly hyperbolic, but you get the gist)
I think it's fair to say that if the wiki's intent is to share information with people, you want people (and not just the inner circle of those in the know) to be able to find it. And the way most people find things is on Google.
Personally I liked it 10 years ago when I searched for something and Google actually delivered useful results that were related to what I was searching. Nowadays, when I search for anything, I mostly get blogspam, ai slop and useless articles or in the very best scenario, good content on a page infested with ads (luckily there's ublock origin).
So yeah, when my goal is to search for content that would be in a wiki, I'm ecstatic when I get an independent wiki over fandom. The Google Jail is the opposite of what I'd want.
Nowadays, I use Kagi which is better than Google but it's still not to the level of Google in 2010.
> 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?
It wouldn't surprise me. It seems like a mirror of the social media move from social graphs to recommendation engines. You are either producer or consumer and never shall consumer be promoted organically.
I couldn't agree more with this comment!
The answer is simple. Limit your time on social media the way you'd be limiting a child and focus on IRL interactions.
That or Google is getting so unusable even Discord is a better search engine.
Not the end, just google bleeding itself out as a search engine while LLMs take over. Chatgpt often links me random, actually decent sites that I wouldn't have gotten from a simple google search on first page, because it would've been exclusively seo slop
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
This is great for users, but it’s terrible for the SEO of those independent wikis as you’re telling Google you want to click on Fandom and Fextra links.
/edit
It appears this is no longer the case and the extension does things a lot better than it used to!
That might be true for the default config in the extension, but you can also configure the extension to de-emphasize fandom wikis or outright hide them in search results. I don't quite remember the exact default config though.
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 with a virus.
Generally I've found a good portion of websites that block users with ad blockers tend to be the worst offenders with aggressive ads...
> Generally I've found a good portion of websites that block users with ad blockers tend to be the worst offenders with aggressive ads...
It is a common cycle: as they get more aggressive with trying to make the ad based business model work, more and more people are pushed to installing blockers. At this point there is a choice: find a less crappy business model (not an easy task, many have failed) or double down and get more iffy with the adverts and who you partner with to serve them. Eventually it gets to a point where such a high proportion or the viewers are using blockers and the next step in ads/stalking is a step too far even for them, and then the blocker blocking attempts start.
Given that these ad networks have actually served real malware on normally trustworthy sites (even nytimes was affected) the meme is essentially true even today.
Ad blockers are malware protection.
> 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 with a virus.
That used to be the reality around decade ago for those who don’t know. Some applications changed the default front page of the browser, hijacked other websites to inject popups and so on
>around decade ago
Two decades now actually. By 2016 we were already seeing the mass transition to browsing on phones instead of PCs, Windows 10 was already out and for reasons I am not quite sure of the old homepage and toolbar hijackers were on the decline and adblockers were on the rise although I am sure there were still people using malware ridden Internet Explorers for years after.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_hijacking
Ouch, already 11 years since the Windows 10 release.
> But a recent update has caused them to block users with ad blockers.
I'm noticing that Ad-Shield is becoming a continual fight these days with pageloads that complete then they fly in with a "ha ha here's a fake error report turn off your adblocker aye?".
Every time their live support chat is open (why would the anti-adblock firm even offer one), I send them Goatse.
> Every time their live support chat is open […], I send them Goatse.
Unfortunately there is little chance that a human is anywhere near the other end of that chat these days, so your evil is somewhat wasted.
> (why would the anti-adblock firm even offer one)
They want to appear to care. And appear to be a company of real people, who you might like if you met in real life, who will be out of pocket if you don't look at their ads.
If there is a person on the other end it’s not someone who has any link to the company, they’ll be an outsourced service, so all you’d be doing is sending graphic porn to a poorly paid worker.
It’s like screaming at a cashier because the supermarket head office made annoying changes to the company.
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
Yet you can be absolutely sure that Google is training their AI products on the same pages they do not want to show to their search 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 tiny Teclis indexer also uses RSS files for discovery for their indie web index.
> Way to help your users
Dear Jim,
At Google, our intent is to help our stockholders, not our users.
Sincerely,
Alphabet inc.
That's every company
It’s not every company having the effective monopoly on what can be found (i.e. what exists) on the web.
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.
Whatever that github wiki mirror is doing, try that. You know the one, always at the top of search results...
I dont know about this, I've been heading a wiki for a rather specific niche that was made about 1.5 years ago and it easily got most top results for it's focus in just a few months.
It sounds like the issue isnt for "independent wikis" but for wikis competing with an existing domain already hosting one on the topic, in this case fandom.com's.
What's the wiki? I'm always interested to get more data points on this, because it has definitely applied to wikis for brand new topics that aren't competing with anything on Fandom (it's not the same as the normal "duplicate content penalty" that people talk about)
this is not only wiki, unfortunately google tries something at least for 6 months and "shadowing" is real thing. no manual action, no information, indexes here and valid; but no imp & clicks.
make some social noise. signals has always good impact.
As a bandaid solution we probably just need a good base domain for game wikis attached to a somewhat trustworthy foundation (that won’t sellout to Fandom in a week). Agree that wierdgloop.org is not … great
What's wrong with weird gloop? The RuneScape wikis are very high quality, same with the Minecraft wiki. Cook and others running are transparent and seem to have good intentions.
I think you can love what we're doing with the wikis, but also be candid that it's not an optimal reader-facing domain name. It was never really intended to be that - it's literally just named after a random item in RuneScape I discovered
But it ended up being the only reasonable place we owned where we could put Fortnite, Overwatch and Valheim wikis that wouldn't get crushed by this new Google jail situation. Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first. Chicken and egg.
Thank you so much for what you do.
> Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first.
So why not get such domain, wait out until it is let out of Google Jail and then put all the wikis on subdomains?
I imagine you would quickly gain trust and people would immediately recognize the links and know that this is the place to go. As opposed to the current state where the wikis have separate domain names and for each game we need to learn which one is the "good one".
⸻
Second question: Any thoughts on liberating non-gaming wikis from fandom, such as TV show wikis?
The domain is suboptimal. The group is great!
It's two english words both of which have negative conotations?
What’s wrong with wiki.gg?
Tons of ads.
The bar has been raised on all web content for Google to index, esp new domains like you say but even some subdomains.
That answer is quality content (higher than AI or human medians), links and pr and social activity and mentions, and then user experience.
And yet, I have to dig my way through pages upon pages of AI trash sites for many Google queries. Somehow THOSE don’t seem to have a problem getting indexed (Maybe they run a sufficient number of ads?).
Given none of the wikis pointed to in the article have ads, I'd say you're right.
Have they fixed the scam problem though?
Google search results dont care about content quality. And did not for years already. It killed good quality blogs and sites long before the AI slop came in.
This is a shame because Fandom is frequently terrible, but also consumes all the oxygen.
One hand washes the other: they buy ads from Google (I think), so Google prefers them in the indexing process, so they get more traffic, so Google prefers them even more.
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.
> Memory Alpha seems to be better run.
Some few months ago I couldn't find actors credits for particular roles they had in Star Trek franchise. For whatever reasons these bits were removed but still were present within Wayback Machine.
Then again, in the past I've seen hostile take-overs of fan made wikis into wikia/fandom "infrastructure". In one case wiki was copied, in time articles were slightly edited and new content was added containing... unsolicited fan theories.
The other case: wiki was copied 1:1 due to some inside disagreements, then incorporated into fandom and in approx. 2 years abandoned. The original died as well but someone managed to restore it from Wayback - this time in read-only mode
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).
> except for the occasional donation banner, but that's a minor annoyance compared to what Fandom does
Well, I guess that's true.
It's worth noting, though, that wikipedia's donation demands cover more than the entire screen on a phone.
It's also worth noting that both Wikipedia and Fandom were co-founded by Jimmy Wales.
Well... why? Is he involved with either of them now? Is there a shared persisting influence of some kind?
> It is certainly heading down the same route as Wikipedia with all the problems that entails.
Can you elaborate on what that means? i.e. what aspect of Wikipedia, and in what way Fandom is heading there?
Google has been removing blogs from its searches for years now. You have to search for them specifically. All part of the de-democratisation of the web.
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...
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, so the new act is just complete crap to me.
Fandom probably hosts more copyrighted images and media than the Internet Archive does.
Entertainment studios can often turn a blind eye to use of their properties when it's by fans, for fans, and promotes those franchises. They are not sending C&D to people making avatars, or cosplaying, or memeing their screengrabs into notoriety.
It is weird to think that the WMF and Wikia/Fandom had a common founder and origin.
Courts should review past decisions
Field v. Google, Inc. (2006)
https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-a...
Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. (2015)
https://www.flaglerlawgroup.com/a-new-era-for-fair-use-court...
I am slightly on the fence about this. If the goal is simply to provide a good platform for people to create and share information with each other, then it shouldn't matter if the wiki is indexed in Google or not, in fact "invisibility" might even increase the quality of contributions.
OTOH if the goal is to monetize other people's contributions then yes, I totally get why the "Google jail" would be bad for that, but I'm just not sure that its a cause worth fighting for- that road basically leads to a new Fandom.
That's ignoring how video game wikis are used. People will google "<game> <place where I'm stuck>" and completely miss the wiki. Or "<game> <mechanic>". Etc. So reachability and proper indexing by search engines is a must.
I've hit this on a few wikis where, for some (at the time inexplicable) reason, I'd get only the crappy Fandom wiki with above queries, and a good wiki when searching only for "<game> wiki" after seeing a link to it on reddit.
When the reason is to move away from Fandom, get people what they are looking for, and perhaps attract contributors, this is an issue. Your average gamer won't route through the Wiki's main page, rather rely on the top Google search result for their issue.
I think this logic falls apart if you realize that wikis only "work" when you're able to get some of the readers to turn into long-term contributors, and losing 90% of your traffic by not showing up on Google is a great way to kill that funnel.
There's a ton of historical evidence of wiki migrations (1) starting out with all of the editors and none of the readers, (2) not doing anything to get those readers to the new site, and (3) ultimately losing the whole war because the reader->editor flow was still happening on the Fandom wiki. "Invisibility" is absolutely not desirable here, even if your only goal is maximizing the amount of good contributions.
Yes, but the point is that maybe in 2026 we should be looking at ways to pay contributors/creators, rather than steal from them (slightly hyperbolic, but you get the gist)
I think it's fair to say that if the wiki's intent is to share information with people, you want people (and not just the inner circle of those in the know) to be able to find it. And the way most people find things is on Google.
Personally I liked it 10 years ago when I searched for something and Google actually delivered useful results that were related to what I was searching. Nowadays, when I search for anything, I mostly get blogspam, ai slop and useless articles or in the very best scenario, good content on a page infested with ads (luckily there's ublock origin).
So yeah, when my goal is to search for content that would be in a wiki, I'm ecstatic when I get an independent wiki over fandom. The Google Jail is the opposite of what I'd want.
Nowadays, I use Kagi which is better than Google but it's still not to the level of Google in 2010.