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Comment by remedan | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

The default config is good for SEO, which is to re-order search results to put independent wikis above Fandom (driving clicks to the independent wiki), as well as disabling Fandom results + injecting a button to the indie wiki.

Indie Wiki Buddy re-orders search engine results to move independent wiki results above Fandom, driving clicks to the independent wiki. And for cases where the independent wiki doesn't show up, the Fandom result is disabled and a separate button is added that links directly to the independent wiki.

That's interesting. Some of the fandom wikis are really high quality (memory-alpha, starwars) and were my introduction to the service. I suppose I appreciate that someone paying for the hosting and running the wiki has to be paid for somehow. And this kind of consolidation makes it worse if the underlying provider fails, but ideally avoids that so individually hosted instances don't more silently disappear. It makes me wonder about the most reasonable balance.

I also enjoyed browsing the list of mappings:

https://github.com/IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy/blob/main...

The user contributions may be high-quality but the site they are on is so low quality that I find the information to be of lower quality. I don’t care how well filled out it is: if the site is bad then the information is not worth my time.

I say this as a Star Trek fan.

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