Comment by JayNeely | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JayNeely | Hacker News Reader

The article says this isn't an issue for subdomains of established domains, but the issues it describes match what we experienced setting up a game wiki for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint at https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/ -- almost a year of not having any pages show up in search results, even though we were getting good links to it and there were no better alternatives that should have ranked (we never started the wiki for this game on any centralized site; at most all they had for it was a placeholder page).

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.

It used to be (late 00's) that wikis had a big advantage in search results because backlinks were weighted heavily by the ranking algorithm and the dense connectivity of wikis meant that there were always a zillion backlinks to pages on a wiki.

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.

> A wiki is largely indistinguishable in structure from an SEO link farm

Not just indistinguishable but the same. The only difference really is the intent of the owners/authors and (possibly) the quality of the content.

> That sucks for search quality.

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 problem is that independent wikis don't pay the fandom tax to google for preferred search placement. Have you tried contacting your local corruption bureau to negotiate a rate tailored for your circumstances?

Payment for search placement is not a thing.

I would assume they're referring to the advertisements that show up above (and barely distinguishable from) the search results.

It's not called that.

Proof?

There's some sort of reranking, maybe this is how they measure site reputation now? By linking from a large website and people in that website like it? Or SEO?

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