Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
Janizdreg

Doom Wiki Google rank issues

Recommended Posts

Quasar said:

Except it's not stagnant because there's a sea of anons still editing it. The quality of their edits is overall terrible, but since when is a search engine capable of distinguishing the quality of the material it is indexing?

Can you change permissions?

Share this post


Link to post
qoncept said:

Can you change permissions?

On the new wiki? Sure. What's that supposed to accomplish?

On the old wiki, no. Any action taken to hinder editing of it would be viewed as vandalism and my admin permissions would be revoked, as happened to admins on the other moving wikis.

Share this post


Link to post

Speaking of anons... Aren't derelict wikis good carrion for the spambots and vandalbots? Isn't this what is going to happen to the site ultimately? Or is it well-protected? :)

Share this post


Link to post

Really.. if you could change the permissions to be more open, the spam bots could sabotage the site in to oblivion.

Share this post


Link to post

Wikia has good spambot protection. I think they must simply maintain a huge blacklist of bad IPs (possibly mirrored from sites such as StopForumSpam).

That said, they are occasionally subject to attacks from trolls and vandals. It's kinda rare that this goes on a scale large enough to truly damage the wiki; and if that happens then the wikia staff can notice it and mop up the damage.

Allow me to reiterate that the wiki team will not accept vandalism of the old site; even if we want it to drop down its page rank and disappear from first page results. Vandalism just is not the way to go.

Share this post


Link to post

I have just added a link to the Wiki on my homepage, that might help a little. According to the linkExtend toolbar, the PR for http://doomwiki.org/ is 4, which is better than mine which is 3. But all quality links help.

Share this post


Link to post

Everyone or some should link to the new wiki in forum signatures around the web, as crawlers will definitely pick those up over time and increase the rank of the site.

Share this post


Link to post
Mr. Chris said:

Everyone or some should link to the new wiki in forum signatures around the web, as crawlers will definitely pick those up over time and increase the rank of the site.


Unless of course all URLs on forums are of nofollow type.

Share this post


Link to post

i recently heard that wikia is bad so i start linking on my site to doomwiki.

im new here, actually i was a quake player :x is there a topic of the whole story what happend on wikia and about the split? drama, death, corruption.

Share this post


Link to post

and ungainly "wysiwyg" editing interfaces would be proposed,

Excuse me, but why is WYSIWYG considered bad? I'd rather have that than deal with convoluted (unwieldy) wiki markup to draw common elements, such as tables.

I know the WYSIWYG from wikia wasn't/isn't complete: make something more complicated (like a table I guess) and it returns to plain text markup.

Share this post


Link to post
printz said:

Excuse me, but why is WYSIWYG considered bad? I'd rather have that than deal with convoluted (unwieldy) wiki markup to draw common elements, such as tables.


The reason is simple: they output extremely broken wikicode. Stupid things like opening and closing a tag a dozen times with nothing in between (so it's empty and not displayed, but it still takes up over a hundred characters), adding the same category twenty times, etc.

It is also fundamentally incapable to cope with templates, which are heavily used in any decent wiki, Doom wiki included, which makes them de facto useless.

People who type out their wiki code have to know how wiki code works (it's not that hard to learn), which means that they need to be computer literate and technically minded -- exactly the kind of guys you want to work on a knowledgebase about software. Wikia's efforts to maximize their userbase through WYSIWYG editors, "create an article" and "upload photos" wizards result in wikis that are cobbled together blindly by dumb kids, who
#1 don't know how to use a wiki,
#2 don't know there are policies and guidelines in place,
#3 don't know what they are talking about as they have neither the knowledge nor the motivation to check their facts,
#4 don't know how to type in intelligible English,
#5 bloat the database with useless crap because they only need to click two or three times to make it happen.

This is an elitist viewpoint, but it has been justified by what happened on the Doom wikia; where people contributed highly useful content such as "Doom weapons that look like faces" (this includes all weapons).

Share this post


Link to post
Gez said:

The reason is simple: they output extremely broken wikicode. Stupid things like opening and closing a tag a dozen times with nothing in between (so it's empty and not displayed, but it still takes up over a hundred characters), adding the same category twenty times, etc.

It is also fundamentally incapable to cope with templates, which are heavily used in any decent wiki, Doom wiki included, which makes them de facto useless.

That's just bad and incomplete programming, it has nothing to do with WYSIWYG possibly being inherently bad.


People who type out their wiki code have to know how wiki code works (it's not that hard to learn), which means that they need to be computer literate and technically minded -- exactly the kind of guys you want to work on a knowledgebase about software. Wikia's efforts to maximize their userbase through WYSIWYG editors, "create an article" and "upload photos" wizards result in wikis that are cobbled together blindly by dumb kids, who
#1 don't know how to use a wiki,
#2 don't know there are policies and guidelines in place,
#3 don't know what they are talking about as they have neither the knowledge nor the motivation to check their facts,
#4 don't know how to type in intelligible English,
#5 bloat the database with useless crap because they only need to click two or three times to make it happen.

This is an elitist viewpoint, but it has been justified by what happened on the Doom wikia; where people contributed highly useful content such as "Doom weapons that look like faces" (this includes all weapons).

That's why there's an undo function! Now our DoomWiki edits have to be reviewed and approved by a select group of people. I doubt even Wikipedia has that...

Share this post


Link to post
printz said:

That's just bad and incomplete programming, it has nothing to do with WYSIWYG possibly being inherently bad.

It has everything to do with WYSIWYG being inherently bad. To have a template-aware W editor, you'd need to have a Turing-capable AI driving the editor. That is overkill.

Wiki pages aren't static document like a novel typed in Word. They are a cascade of highly dynamic elements which can all be updated separately (templates, transcluded pages, etc.). This is far too complex for some JavaScript widget, heck it's far too complex for an average Office suite.

printz said:

That's why there's an undo function! Now our DoomWiki edits have to be reviewed and approved by a select group of people. I doubt even Wikipedia has that...

That just means that the maintainers have more work to do policing the edits than before. The review and approval system isn't inducing without its own load of headaches. And the shit edits still pollute the document's history forever and ever.

Share this post


Link to post

That's all of mancubus.net not responding. It's been acting out like that sporadically for a couple days.

Share this post


Link to post

This is a bit of a bump, but I was browsing the wiki earlier and ran across the related discussion in Central Processing. Curious to test it out, I typed "doom wiki" in Google, scrolled through several pages worth of results, and concluded that Doomwiki.org does not show up in the search results at all.

If this isn't a "just me" caused by whatever Google's search personalization is doing to the results (can't imagine why, though), it's probably time to revisit this issue.

Share this post


Link to post

Furthermore, whenever I want Doomwiki I don't search for Doom at all. I type in something like this:

map18 the courtyard doomwiki


Google throws up the Wikia link and insists I meant "doom wiki" instead of "doomwiki".

EVERY.

DAMN.

TIME.

Is there a setting somewhere in Google to stop this from happening? I both want to do my bit to get Doomwiki at the top, and never ever want to click the Wikia link because those ad-filled pages slow my poor laptop to shit.

Share this post


Link to post

Use site:doomwiki.org (instead of doomwiki) and you get anything you want without all the junk.

Xaser said:
If this isn't a "just me" caused by whatever Google's search personalization is doing to the results (can't imagine why, though), it's probably time to revisit this issue.

For me the Doom Wiki article is showing up on the first page as the fifth result.

Share this post


Link to post

I get the same searching for "doom wiki", no doomwiki.org listed in the first 7 pages, if at all. Even the Legacy Wiki comes up on page 2 and that hasn't had a single edit in over a year.

Either we're doing something wrong with it, or Google are fucking up somewhere. That, or it's some sort of dark voodoo magic from wikia, clogging up the tubes.

Share this post


Link to post

Perhaps it's banned in Britain, since you're both there :p

Share this post


Link to post
DooMAD said:

it's some sort of dark voodoo magic from wikia

That's actually probable. They have entire teams of SEO professionals since getting hits is how they make money.

Share this post


Link to post

If I search Doom Wiki, doomwiki.org is 5th. If I search DoomWiki without the space, it's 2nd.

Share this post


Link to post

Our SEO has actually increased slightly since launch and for many queries I do, we actually show up first. Of course maybe that's Google somehow tracking my own personal site preferences like the Big Brother that it has become, but... it's just something I've noticed.

This was not accomplished without some effort on my part. I made subtle changes to many of the pages to change their wording from the same articles on Wikia so that they are not treated as duplicates, I made sure that "DoomWiki.org" refers to itself as such everywhere, since the phrase "Doom Wiki" is intractably bound to "Wikia" by Google at this point, and also configured the meta tags in MediaWiki to set appropriate - and different - tags than the ones used by Wikia. I saw an almost immediate increase in SEO after making those changes.

One problem we have is that MancuNet has been attacked at least three separate times now by redirect exploits. Every time this happens it knocks our SEO back down a bit. We just resolved the most recent attack last week and still do not know for sure what vector was used to accomplish it.

Another thing hurting us is the fact that Wikipedia still links to Wikia, everywhere, for everything DOOM related. Given that old Jimbo owns both establishments, trying to change that will almost inevitably be met with some kind of resistance. Probably not at first, but whenever somebody on the Wikia payroll who is kept around to ensure that Wikia links remain on Wikipedia notices.

Share this post


Link to post

I just made a search for "Doom wiki"

Place 1 is the home link to Wikia.
All other remaining links to a Doom Wiki on the first page, however, link to doomwiki.org.
And not a single further Wikia link on the first 3 pages.

Which makes me suspect that Wikia is paying Google for the listing on top.

Share this post


Link to post

Re-reading my post, I realize I made a bit of a punctuation whoopsie. When I wrote "doom wiki", I meant that I searched it without quotes, which is a rather hard conclusion to arrive at given the search engine context. Welp. :P

To clarify my findings:

  • doom wiki (no quotes) results in no doomwiki.org at all.
  • "doom wiki" (with quotes) has Wikia as the 1st result, Wikipedia as the 2nd, and doomwiki.org as the 3rd (but, as DooMAD pointed out, it links here, not Entryway, likely due to Google's "similar page" filtering)
  • doomwiki (no space) results in Wikia in 1st place and doomwiki.org in 2nd (same page as above though; still no Entryway)
I guess my big concern here is the fact that the most common form of the query (no quotes, with space) results in nothing at all, meaning that folks are unlikely to locate doomwiki.org unless they already know of it in the first place.

[EDIT] The search results for doomwiki (no space) do tend to reflect Graf's conclusion: Literally everything on the front page but the first link are from doomwiki.org, and the Wikia front page doesn't contain no-space "doomwiki" even once. Wikia is clearly receiving special treatment.

Not that we'd ever beat Wikia to the top spot anyway; I'd at least like to see doomwiki.org second or third in all relevant queries, which isn't the case at the moment.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×