It's better to use https://getindie.wiki/, which sends you to the specific replacement wikis rather than BreezeWiki (though it does support BreezeWiki).

Doesn’t it just redirect to BreezeWiki? BreezeWiki is just a Fandom mirror as far as I am aware. So while you won’t see Fandoms ads, the content is still on Fandom. Though, it is still better than the actual website by a lot… and the other redirects it offers are pretty great as well. https://breezewiki.com/

> but critically not yet Google).

My takeaway from the recent Google search engine ranking documentation leak was that they very heavily uprank big brand names. A page on reddit with various short comments (many of them useful I'm sure) is going to always outrank a random individual's blog with a well-researched article about the same topic. Same for Quora, Facebook, and the other websites with big moderation teams and where we all know what to expect.

There is something to be said for it as well: the quality of a reddit discussion or quora answers will probably be more consistent than if you serve up random other pages (those may be content farms, ad farms, unresearched opinions...). Other pages on the web may be better, or may be worse. I'm guessing that Google figures/found they look better if they don't serve up (m)any bad results but rather pretend that big brands are the internet now, sticking to an average (mediocre-ish) quality

Perhaps that's why Google likes big brand Wikia better than this new domain

Not only this, but I've been using Kagi's Redirect feature to redirect fandom results if I see some. For instance for Path of Exile, simply:

^https://pathofexile.fandom.com|https://poewiki.net

Alternatively the Redirector extension can also achieve similar results, without having Kagi, and converting all links, not just search results [1].

[1]: https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector

That doesn’t solve the problem that most people will find Fandom first when searching for it.

What you move to when you quit Fandom. Super common for games.

Examples:

Fandom: https://noita.fandom.com/wiki/Noita_Wiki

Official: https://noita.wiki.gg/wiki/Noita_Wiki

Fandom: https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Terraria_Wiki

Official: https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria

Fandom: https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Minecraft_Wiki

Official: https://minecraft.wiki/

Two of the three Fandom wiki's above are still ranked higher than the official ones on Google.

There isn't one, there are hundreds. Given that you end up on a small fandom wiki, you have no idea where 'the better community' is. You go to your search engine of choice and start clicking random wikis hoping at least one other one has decent info (most are useless).

As a concrete example, Path of Exile moved to https://www.poewiki.net/ (which is a single MediaWiki instance not associated with a larger network). The content is quite good but it took probably 18 months for it to start reliably appearing in google search results.

So people looking for a wiki with a quick search end up clicking on the fandom link, being bombarded with ads as well as potentially outdated or incorrect information, instead of clicking on the wiki that doesn't have those issues. In turn, that gives fandom more ad views and potential clicks, perpetuating the problem.

So search engines continue to serve the SEO-riddled landgrab garbage over the valuable resource, new visitors to the community continue to get served bad information and deterred from involving themselves further, the maintainers of the real wiki have to waste spare time figuring out how to deal with this nonsense over maintaining the resource, and Fandom continues to pollute the informational commons to its own gain and everyone else's detriment.