Big week! We just finished moving the Overwatch and Fortnite wikis off of Fandom. It’s still my favorite thing in the world to help wiki editors grab control of their projects and make them awesome (and not covered with a dozen auto-playing video ads!) Unlike most of the other wikis we host (runescape.wiki, minecraft.wiki, gta.wiki…), both Overwatch and Fortnite are launching at subdomains of weirdgloop.org instead of on their own root domain, like (say) overwatch.wiki. There is an unusually good reason for this, and the rest of this post will be going into excruciating detail about:
- a frustrating change that Google made in early 2024 to how it treats brand-new-domains
- the wide-ranging effects of these changes on the entire independent wiki ecosystem
- how I’m trying to work around this new “Google Jail” for the wikis that we host If you have a new domain, only the main page shows up on Google search results These March 2024 changes have a specific “failure mode” on Google Search which has made it even more difficult for a certain class of new wikis (and most likely, new websites in general) to show up in search results. For the last two years, with very few exceptions, wikis on brand new domains will not show up on Google Search for anything other than the main page. Since ~85% of video game wiki traffic comes from Google, and wikis (obviously) have many popular pages other than the main page, this is a pretty catastrophic outcome. Here’s what we think we know:
- This has happened to about 90% of wikis I’m aware of that have launched on brand new domains since the March 2024 Google core update. This includes gta.wiki and hytalewiki.org that we host, hollowknight.wiki, the official Path of Exile 2 wiki, and a couple dozen smaller wikis
- This happens regardless of whether the content is brand-new, or derived from something else (like Fandom) that Google is already indexing. It’s not the conventional “duplicate content” issue that wikis have had to deal with for...