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

> 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?

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 course, after I post this, it's now working again...)

On to the Hytale Wiki example. I don't know if what I'm about to say applies to Google, but I'm approaching it from the perspective of my tiny dumb indieweb indexer for my personal search engine. It is much easier for me to index from a sitemap rather than try to crawl a website, so I basically look exclusively at sitemaps.

Looking at Hytale Wiki, my process:

* Site has a robots.txt file - good!

* Robots.txt mentions a sitemap - excellent!

* The sitemap is stored at /images/sitemaps/index.xml ... oh. I would usually not index anything from a /images/ folder, because I want to index pages only, not images. This would likely trip my exclusion filters. Let's ignore that and continue.

* The sitemap is a list of an additional 26 nested Gzipped sitemaps. Oh.

This is the point where my tiny dumb indexer would stop. Gzipped sitemaps are part of the standard, but they're relatively rare on the web for small sites. They typically only get used if a sitemap file exceeds the 50,000 pages-per-sitemap limit. In this case, 26 * 50,000 makes the HyTale Wiki look like a 1.3 Million page site. Do I really want to index 1.3 Million pages, an estimated 13GB of indexed text data, about a video game I'll probably never play?

My search index is storage constrained, and my indexer is very time constrained. The time I spend indexing your site is time not spent indexing another, possibly higher quality website. So at this point, I'd just grab the front page and disappear... like Google apparently does too.

Of course, the HyTale site isn't 1.3 Million pages, it's only 4,277 articles. That would all fit in the root sitemap file, and that might be the better approach for getting indexed.

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

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...

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

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.

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

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.

This is a shame because Fandom is frequently terrible, but also consumes all the oxygen.

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.

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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.