A new “Google Jail” traps independent wikis on brand-new domains

Weird Gloop, the group behind runescape.wiki, minecraft.wiki and gta.wiki, has finished moving the Overwatch and Fortnite wikis off Fandom. Unlike its earlier projects, both now launch on subdomains of weirdgloop.org rather than their own root domains — and the reason is strictly practical.

What changed in March 2024

Since Google's March 2024 core update, wikis that launch on brand-new domains have, with few exceptions, not appeared in Google Search for anything other than their main page. About 85% of video game wiki traffic comes from Google, which makes that a severe failure mode.

The blog post estimates the problem has hit around 90% of the wikis it is aware of that launched on new domains after the update, including gta.wiki, hytalewiki.org, hollowknight.wiki and the official Path of Exile 2 wiki at poe2wiki.net. It is not the classic duplicate-content problem, and not really a ranking problem either: a wiki's main page sometimes beats Fandom's, yet no other page on the domain shows up at all.

How long the jail lasts

The effect lasts for an unclear period, sometimes up to a year, and can be escaped by a major game update that brings significant new traffic and content — Undertale and Vampire Survivors are given as examples. It can also switch on and off, with wikis leaving the jail for a few months and later returning. Usually, though not always, other pages are still crawled and indexed and turn up in a site: search. The relevant factor appears to be roughly when Google first indexed the domain, not when it was registered, and the author found no evidence of the pattern before March 2024.

Subdomains of established domains are fine

Wikis launched on subdomains of existing, established domains — wiki.leagueoflegends.com, wiki.warframe.com, hypixelskyblock.minecraft.wiki — were indexed immediately. overwatch.weirdgloop.org, launched only seven days before the post, already outperformed every wiki sitting in the jail on page indexing. Weird Gloop sees three options: keep the natural root domain (wrecked on Google), arrange a subdomain with the game studio (achievable about half the time), or host under a domain it already controls. The author hopes to 301-redirect overwatch.weirdgloop.org to overwatch.wiki in around six months using Google's change of address tool, and has asked wiki editors and SEO specialists for data on the phenomenon.