There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
weirdgloop.org
weirdgloop.org
Only after months of making sure our Steam news posts were consistently linking to pages within our wiki did we eventually see Google suddenly open the floodgates and start connecting searchers with the info they were searching for.
I've built out highly-ranked content sites before, and none of what I'd learned from getting those started seemed to work with this wiki, for no apparent reason. Google Search Console showed plenty of pages on the wiki were indexed; it just wasn't displaying them. Seeing this post I fully believe the premise that there's simply an arbitrary Google Jail for independent wikis. That sucks for search quality.
Entirely possible that this is caught in a malfunctioning webspam filter. A wiki is largely indistinguishable in structure from an SEO link farm; indeed, any abandoned wiki can be and usually is turned into a link farm by bots. Maybe Google decided that its default was going to be to ban all wikis until a sufficient mass of evidence comes that it's trusted. Which, again, sucks for search quality, but the web and Google Search have both been pretty much dead for the last ~5 years anyway, we just rely on them anyway.
Not just indistinguishable but the same. The only difference really is the intent of the owners/authors and (possibly) the quality of the content.
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.
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 and for most Dota-related keywords, fandom is still ranked higher than liquipedia. I don't know if the quality of fandom site has improved though.)
Using an extension to block fandom.com results is helpful because for other games I'm not really thinking about it when searching for something and find myself on that tumor of a website.
In theory I can imagine somebody feeling bad for 'poor fandom' getting scraped (and I do feel bad for some websites that have parties like Google take their content and regurgitate it without sending traffic) but nope, F*k Fandom because they cynically exploit the open CC licenses that this content was created with to guarantee themselves the right to compete with the original creators forever even when the creators want to leave.
Fandom was pure corruption even before the tenth round of enshittification.
Also, nobody knows how much money Jimmy Wales took home from selling Fandom to TPG/IMC.
Wikipedia actually does appear to have separate pages for every Lord of the Rings character. Frankly I think it makes sense for this series, since there's a truly unusual and effortful amount of worldbuilding behind its scenes, and since it has been so influential to fiction (even regardless of medium).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings
Anyway, Jimmy Wales doesn't unilaterally make article inclusion/exclusion decisions; there's a whole debate and voting process that Wikipedians use to make decisions like that. So if anyone were to be called corrupt for making ill-fated decisions to delete articles, it would be a bunch of pseudonymous Wikipedia users. And I think they likely acted in good faith, trying to improve the encyclopedia, even though it didn't work out well and wasn't what I would have done.
In case you didn't know Fandom is not the one who is writing the wiki. The pages are community contributed. If it's out of date it means no one has contributed information about newer patches.
> If you want visitors then you have to...
They'd say "Or, we can just have really good SEO and get those visitors without earning them!"
I generally agree with your sentiment against trusting free services/things.
I agree with paying for Kagi.
But I can see why people try to be frugal with their money and use free services.
The problem is handing over money guarantees nothing.
Money provides the opportunity for the other party to do the right thing by you. But they may take your money and do the shitty thing anyway. Particularly when you have no real way to tell - like most people using the internet.
But re: kagi specifically, for me personally, the delta is obvious and isn't trust based.
When I use Kagi I have a curated search experience that has a relatively high information density - driven in large part by the alignment of incentives and the ability for me to tune my results.
There is a noticeable difference for me when I switch to 'free' alternatives where the content thrown in front of me is mining for attention and CPM - because the cost of 'free' is covered by the value of my attention. The cost of kagi is less than the value of my attention.
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
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.
Then I realized - the sitemap files are being overwritten in real time. Every edit on the Wiki is causing the sitemap file to be edited in real time. That's why the sitemaps sometimes stop right in the middle of a filename when I access it - the sitemap file is in the process of being rewritten.
That's a behavior unique to a Wiki, and might explain the entire phenomenon.
The recent issues relate to site errors due to aggressive crawling of uncached, server-intensive pages (diffs, etc) hidden behind residential proxies. We were being hit sufficiently hard that the server had stability issues and we were penalised by Google.
I would expect Google to handle broken or missing sitemaps, honestly.
/edit
It appears this is no longer the case and the extension does things a lot better than it used to!
I also enjoyed browsing the list of mappings:
https://github.com/IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy/blob/main...
I say this as a Star Trek fan.
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?
This has been a thing for a long time in domain name resale for speculation or link farming or similar, domains that are aged with "backlinks" sell for more money.
The targets in the spam world (email and seo) that want to make money want the low hanging fruit. They want uneducated people to visit the site. I remember when google was still young, these same people wanted visitors from AOL. Why? lower traffic and much higher conversion. What kind of person uses AOL when google is available? An uneducated one and a new one to the internet. Or an older person who is likely to fall for a scheme.
I suspect more and more visitors coming from google will be seen this way in the age of AI and social media searching. Easy targets. Whether it's true or not is debatable (maybe people just want to read a real webpage and have AI burnout). Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk.
People who work in actual infrastructure building tech may not know or have any reason to pay attentino to how many shady "affiliate" networks there are in existence for click traffic.
PBNs are designed to look legit to a Google manual review, to remain indexed, to retain whatever value Google gave to the previous legit incarnation of the site. (The key marketplace for sourcing candidate PBN websites are expired domains that recently had strong search engine rankings)
It's a pure organic SEO play, not a human conversion play. The idea is that the PBN site has a retained link value. And that link value is used to (directly or indirectly) link to a site that is the money site, to boost the search rankings of that money site.
The money site isn't going to be an AI-slop site, it's going to be the polished well-optimised, well-performing as it can be. The PBNs that give the money site credence, that varies based on how much work the money-site owner is willing to spend on the network. The lower end is not even AI-slop, but a static website programmatically generated by content spinning and synonym replacement, where the content is scraped from other sites or perhaps even archive.org snapshots of long dead sites.
If enough independent-looking, diverse-seeming, legit-looking sites are linking to a commercial site, that suggests an element of trust and respectability. That's what PBN creators rely on, creating the appearance of authoritativeness good enough to fool/coerce Google into ranking the money site higher.
The big companies are trying to corral and kill everybody else, yes.
That's not some "end-game", though. It's just powerful anti-social entities doing their thing while society refuses to punish them.
There isn’t even an ability to turn on a feature to have discord chats indexed or anything. I realize it’s not only discord but it’s illustrative of what I perceive as an issue
See also: any number of user-contributed sites that were bought by big players and basically parked. Does anyone even go to mp3.com for any real reason other than to see if anything has been done with it since the original was forced offline? I suspect they'll eventually unload it to someone who forks over enough money.
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...
Ad blockers are malware protection.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s like screaming at a cashier because the supermarket head office made annoying changes to the company.
Occasionally your server deserves a bit of dickish behaviour because of their attitude, but this is relatively rather rare in my experience.
The cashier is a real human doing a job to put food on the table and has done nothing to deserve it, and may well have been far more hurt by the head office than you.
It turned out that default Mediawiki stuff doesn’t do a lot of standard SEO stuff. I just did all of it. From the jsonld tags, to the meta description, to making sure the sitemaps were correct. As soon as I did, my site started showing up on Google.
I cannot speak to these wikis’ problems but the first port of call for me would be checking that everything “standard” for this is now done. It’s just a reality of the web these days. I do get random traffic from Google now. Much less than I used to under the old regime in the 2000s but it feels more like a secular change than the flat zero listings I previously did.
I wish I had kept track of everything so that one day I could say what I did but I just followed literally everything, including removing the index.php thing that Mediawiki uses by default. So I cannot even say which actions worked and which didn’t. I can’t even recall which changes to base I did do. Link rel canonical. A robots.txt that disables access to pages that accidentally duplicate content (e.g. permalink pages). Hard to tell. But the difference was stark 0 to hundreds of pages. Literally zero dude. And it happened weeks after the changes and very suddenly.
0: It’s not what he does as a job but he might remember https://www.jrhizor.dev/
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
I don't mind that LLMs will find it....I used a bunch of agents to find sources for them and produce summaries of it, and even to build the site. It took a lot of human research too, but all my notes and snippets were sent to LLMs.
I hope this means no more of these objects are lost.
I wrote all that not intending to plug, but now it seems obtuse https://murder-stones.org
In summary, if the incentive is to find things for your own amusement, the incentive is still there!
My tiny search indexer is going through now, and not finding any problems with indexing your site so far. If you see a Go program in your logs accessing with a 10 second delay between each page... hi! :D
Looking at your sitemap, I notice that only the front page (the one indexed page) has a priority of 1.0. Maybe experiment with making some other pages have a 1.0 priority as well, and see if that helps with indexing.
It's clear to me that much of the site was created & designed with an LLM, and that might be getting penalized. I imagine search engines are able to detect AI text and use that as a quality signal. For example, it's a big block of text under the Context & Sources section here, I think a human would break that up into paragraphs and use different phrasing.
https://murder-stones.org/stones/charlotte-dymond-memorial
Oh, and your Meta Descriptions are getting clipped, and clearly just the first words of the page. eg:
"Charlotte Dymond, an 18-year-old servant at Penhale Farm, was killed on Bodmin Moor by fellow servant Matthew Weekes after an argument; he confessed and was han"
Humanizing those descriptions could help too. Personally I hand-write the descriptions for every page on my sites, and try to make them look good for search engine display & helpful to humans.
It's also possible I have no clue what I'm talking about :) But I hope that helps!
I'll look into the priority, thanks.
The idea is for human research to slowly replace the LLM descriptions, hence all the boxes for submissions. I was going people might write up their local ones. I am hoping to get out and visit some myself, get proper photos, and write them up properly.
My first move was finding some to visit! I put all my early efforts into dicovery. The map itself was the important bit.
I asked Claude code to extend the meta descriptions since bing said they were too short, now I see it found a shortcut!
Thanks for taking a look.
With LLMs replacing Google search results, the incentive for creating website content is changing again.
And I'm reaching the same conclusions as you: "In summary, if the incentive is to find things for your own amusement, the incentive is still there!". I think we are reverting back to our original form of the Web.
Before the commercialisation of content. Also of the early blog days, when we wrote about stuff because we found it interesting, not because of conversion rates and eyeball counts, and session lengths.
And we found great stuff by serendipity and casual mentions in conversation -- like you right here. :-)
I suppose, with a rekindling of writing for our own amusement, we're going to need a catalogue of sites, to help people serendipitously discover these varied interests. yet another hierarchical officious oracle, maybe?
Unfortunately in my case, I can't justify the distilling/production time sink unless there is some kind of monetary incentive. I already donate time to other projects, and there's only so much time in a day.
YMMV
Just because the thing that used to work on the internet no longer works on the internet doesn't mean there isn't a new thing that is fun to do on the internet. Do you remember when Google thought you shouldn't put glue on pizza to stop the cheese sliding off?
I didn't expect to make money from it.
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.
Robots.txt is in place
I think of RSS as more of a bloggers tool...am I thinking of this wrong.
As for RSS, Google do regard RSS as another sitemap format. There's info here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
I would not submit an RSS file to Google as your sitemap, stick to XML. But also having RSS can be useful for search indexers, because in one RSS download they can find which pages are new, and can index the actual relevant content of the page without all the ads & other cruft.
An RSS feed is really like a newsletter about your website. So if there's anything where visitors to your website might find value in keeping updated via an email newsletter, consider putting that same "newsletter" content also online, and making that your RSS feed. If the content in your RSS feed contains links to the other pages of your website, that can help with page discovery etc. Something like "we just updated the XYZ product page, check it out!" is zero value, but if you've got an article about "Here's how the brand new ABC feature we just added XYZ Product works", then linking to XYZ Product from within the article & RSS content will make sense. It helps the search engines, but it also helps the user who might want to click through to the product that your article is about.
Dear Jim,
At Google, our intent is to help our stockholders, not our users.
Sincerely,
Alphabet inc.
We should really stop with this cynical view that every company is run by greedy bastards who have active contempt for their customers and using it to excuse the behaviour of the worst offenders.
They do, they're just not publicly traded. Private companies still have owners and investors.
Obviously people will disagree with how much harm is enough to be worth regulating, and I'm not trying to make a claim here about whether it's necessary for what we're talking about around search results. My point is that the fact that public companies can theoretically put social good above profits doesn't really change the fact that in practice few do, and the common pattern is worth taking into account.
I still call it Wikia on reflex.
Oh, and Twitter, even though its new reputation is more deserved than before it got acquired.
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.
The only Wikia sites that had anything worthwhile were the ones that started as independent communities and got bought out, like Memory Alpha or the Minecraft wiki.
New domains need to prove they can be trusted to get out of the sandbox and external links from trusted sources are the best way to do that and shorten the time spent in the sandbox.
Big wikis like this go online with thousands of pages on a brand new domain. Without any external trust signal it just looks like spam for Google
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.
"On February 4, 2026, Jay Sullivan was named the new CEO. In a public statement following the arrival of Fandom's new CEO, the company's president, Jimmy Wales, mentioned that they intend to incorporate additional AI tools into Fandom Wikis to adapt to internet searches". No comment.
The James Bond wiki is particularly bad, but Memory Alpha seems to be better run.
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.
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
Can you elaborate on what that means? i.e. what aspect of Wikipedia, and in what way Fandom is heading there?
* Admin enshittifying content that they have no knowledge or interest in. For example, I have witnessed admin trying to get articles about certain rugby union teams deleted, because they were amateur. (Before the 1990s all rugby union was officially amateur, and some notable clubs still are, especially in places like Argentina or Scotland, where professional clubs are not the norm.) They succeed in many cases.
* Administrators may develop a particular dislike for a user, and their decisions may be based on that. I have witnessed personal vendettas and stalking behaviour from them. There are also cliques of friends and other conflicts of interest.
Neither of these are professional if we are thinking purely in terms of content. Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, would get articles cross-checked by people who have an interest or a knowledge of that particular subject. I have seen quotations "corrected" on Wikipedia from their original wording.
As for Fandom, it varies from site to site. Some are better than others. In recent years, Fandom has adopted some community guidelines which are questionable and are being applied across the board. Wikimedia did the same in a top-down power move with no mandate whatsoever. It was a fait accompli. Neither are better for it.
The Broad Scots and Scottish Gaelic Wikipedias both have horrific administration issues, brought on partly by people correcting native speakers. The former created a minor international scandal in the media. The Greenlandic Wikipedia was hijacked by a German who ended up shutting it down. (He deleted other people's articles constantly, instead of improving the content and then wondered why he was the only person left in the room.)
Either way, both remind me of the infinite monkey idea... Except those on the typewriter aren't even getting peanuts unless someone is paying them to write shill articles (and there are many of those.) I'm sure I'll be voted down for making these comments which is why I was reluctant to post earlier.
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.
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?
> There’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, though - based on our experiments so far, it seems like once we establish these new wikis fairly well on Google, it should be safe to move them off weirdgloop.org back to whatever the appropriate name was, while keeping the existing Google juice that the subdomain picked up. I’m hoping that in 6 months or so we can just 301 redirect overwatch.weirdgloop.org to overwatch.wiki, use Google’s change of address tool, and put these wikis to where they should have been in the first place.
For people who regularly get into new games its much easier to learn just one easily distinguished domain with the high quality wikis.
overwatch.weirdgloop.org works better than overwatch.wiki in this sense, apart from the complaints about the odd name up in the comment chain.
Well, at least you didn't go with fossilised dung.
Before my pages had a high ranking in Google.
I also did this with a far more obscure game which doesn't have nearly as much content online. Lucid Blocks. That game was weird AF and the systems didn't make any sense without tons of experimentation. I started by using CC as a journal for things I discovered to help try to build a coherent world view. Ended up just using CC to build a wiki for the game with all the entities and items based off of actual game data.
I also feel like shame correlates strongly with profit. That we're living in an era of lawless lack of accountability, where skirting the law for personal gain is rewarded handsomely. That anyone can make a deal with the devil and rise straight to the top, at least for now in the US until the political pendulum swings from liberty back towards justice.
The decline has been steep and noticeable. It really makes me wonder what happened behind the scenes over there.
Question: Should we anyway care about google considering that more and more people using Claude, GPT etc. for search? Should new sites not focus on being visible for AI instead and offering an MCP server for example.
make some social noise. signals has always good impact.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Unlikely+Valentine
Fandom, Reddit, IGN, Eurogamer, everything is on the front page except fallout.wiki which is where the community is now.
Seriously, it does, but I'm very much sarcastic when I say "don't worry".
That answer is quality content (higher than AI or human medians), links and pr and social activity and mentions, and then user experience.
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...
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.
Doesn't matter how legitimate or real your site, service, or project looks.
Unless it's been online for at least 2 years, it's 99% probably AI slop spam and google would be risking their brand bending over backwards to try and index the majority of it.
That's my take, anyway.
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...
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.
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.
Well, it's a "must" because over the years people have been trained to do this, instead of going directly to a quality website they trust. However, this has also trained website owners to neglect their brand and focus only on SEO, leading to the ad-infested wiki sites we have today.
Google went through all of this many (many) years ago with the "content farm" problem, so this is nothing new, really.
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.
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.