Google's 'jail' for independent wikis and the SEO death spiral

A thread on 'Google Jail' for independent wikis documented a familiar pattern: Google's ranking algorithm heavily favors large established domains, which in the wiki space means Fandom absorbs most search traffic even though Fandom is widely regarded as a bad product. Independent wikis on their own domains struggle to rank regardless of content quality.

The proposed bandaid in the thread was a shared base domain for game wikis under a trusted non-profit foundation, explicitly not one that would sell out to Fandom. Weirdgloop.org was mentioned but dismissed as not quite trustworthy enough. The actual fix, better Google ranking signals for content quality, is not in anyone's control but Google's.

This is a microcosm of a broader problem: Google's dominance in search increasingly means that the incentive to produce good content is decoupled from the incentive to rank well. The entities that rank well are those with domain authority accumulated over years, not those producing the best content today. For small publishers and independent knowledge bases, this is an existential problem with no obvious solution.