Google search penalty locks new wiki domains out of results
Weird Gloop, an operator that hosts independent wikis including runescape.wiki, minecraft.wiki and gta.wiki, just finished moving the Overwatch and Fortnite wikis off Fandom. Unlike most of the wikis it hosts, the two are launching on subdomains of weirdgloop.org rather than getting their own root domain, such as overwatch.wiki. The operator says this is forced by a Google search problem it calls "Google Jail."
Since a March 2024 Google core update, brand-new domains have shown up in Google Search only for their main page, with no other page appearing, according to the post. This has happened to about 90% of the new-domain wikis the author is aware of, including gta.wiki, hytalewiki.org, hollowknight.wiki, the official Path of Exile 2 wiki, and roughly two dozen smaller wikis. Since about 85% of video game wiki traffic comes from Google, losing every page but the homepage is close to catastrophic for a new wiki.
The author lists what he says he knows about the pattern. It is not the conventional duplicate-content problem: it happens whether a wiki's content is brand new or derived from something Google already indexes, like Fandom. It does not track the domain's actual search ranking: in several cases the affected main page already outranks Fandom's equivalent, yet remains the only page that shows up at all. The penalty lasts an unclear period, sometimes up to a year, and has reportedly been broken by a surge of new traffic and content, such as the game updates that let the Undertale and Vampire Survivors wikis escape it. It can intermittently lift and reimpose itself on the same domain, though it seems to always stop eventually. Most affected pages besides the homepage are still crawled and indexed, and still turn up with a site: search, just not in ordinary results. The relevant factor seems to be roughly when Google first indexed the domain rather than its registration date, and the author says he found no evidence of the pattern in any context before March 2024. His own explanation, which he labels explicitly as a guess: Google could no longer reliably tell SEO spam from legitimate new sites, so it opted to broadly suppress brand-new domains instead.
The workaround the post describes is that subdomains of an already-established domain are unaffected. Weird Gloop had already launched wikis on subdomains such as wiki.leagueoflegends.com, wiki.warframe.com and hypixelskyblock.minecraft.wiki, and every one got its non-homepage pages indexed immediately. The parent domain does not need to be especially popular: overwatch.weirdgloop.org, live for only 7 days at the time of writing, was already indexing better than wikis still stuck in Google Jail.
That has changed Weird Gloop's strategy for new wikis. It now weighs three options with the communities it works with: keep the wiki's natural domain name and risk Google Jail; try to get a subdomain from the game studio itself, which the author says works about half the time; or host it, at least temporarily, on a subdomain of a domain Weird Gloop already controls that carries decent authority. The operator says it has been leaning toward the third option, despite disliking putting user-facing wikis under the internal-joke brand "weirdgloop.org." The plan is to let a subdomain build up search visibility, then, hopefully in around 6 months, 301-redirect it to the wiki's intended domain using Google's change-of-address tool, aiming to carry the accumulated ranking over. The post closes with a request for data from other wiki operators or SEO practitioners who have observed the same pattern.
Key facts
- A March 2024 Google core update appears to keep brand-new domains from showing anything but their main page in Google Search, a pattern Weird Gloop calls "Google Jail."
- About 90% of the new-domain wikis the author is aware of have been hit, including gta.wiki, hytalewiki.org, hollowknight.wiki and the official Path of Exile 2 wiki.
- About 85% of video game wiki traffic comes from Google, so losing every page but the homepage is close to catastrophic for a new wiki.
- Subdomains of an already-established domain are unaffected, so Weird Gloop launched the Overwatch and Fortnite wikis it moved off Fandom on weirdgloop.org subdomains instead of new root domains.
- The penalty can last up to a year but has reportedly been broken by major traffic spikes; Weird Gloop hopes to 301-redirect its subdomains to proper domains after about 6 months.
Why it matters
For operators of independent wikis outside Fandom, this Google behavior determines whether moving off Fandom succeeds at all. Weird Gloop argues that since about 85% of wiki traffic comes through Google Search, an operator who cannot get any page but the homepage indexed effectively cannot reach readers, regardless of content quality or community support. What used to be a competitive fight against Fandom's residual search ranking becomes, on this account, a structural obstacle imposed by Google's own indexing behavior toward new domains.
Who it affects
Independent wiki hosts and their communities are affected most directly. The post names gta.wiki, hytalewiki.org, hollowknight.wiki and the official Path of Exile 2 wiki as examples caught in "Google Jail," alongside a rough estimate of a couple dozen smaller wikis. The author believes the underlying pattern likely extends to new websites in general, not only wikis, though the evidence and the workarounds described are drawn specifically from Weird Gloop's own hosting experience.
How to use it
The workaround described is to avoid registering a brand-new root domain for a new site and instead launch it as a subdomain of an existing, already-indexed domain, even an obscure one. Weird Gloop reports this worked immediately for wiki.leagueoflegends.com, wiki.warframe.com and overwatch.weirdgloop.org, without needing the parent domain to be popular. The stated longer-term plan is to let a subdomain accumulate search visibility for roughly 6 months, then 301-redirect it to the originally intended domain using Google's change-of-address tool, in hopes of carrying the accumulated ranking over.
How solid is it
This is one operator's field observation, not a Google-confirmed policy or a controlled study. The author states plainly that his proposed explanation, that Google is broadly suppressing new domains because it can no longer reliably separate SEO spam from legitimate sites, is a guess. The evidence is a set of named wikis he personally operates or is aware of, about 90% of which show the pattern, plus two cases, Undertale and Vampire Survivors, said to have escaped the penalty after major game updates. There is no independent data set and no statement from Google, and the post ends by asking other operators for data to confirm or refine the pattern.
Risks and caveats
Google has not confirmed this behavior or its cause anywhere, and the SEO-spam explanation is explicitly speculative. No exact date is given for when in early 2024 the change began, beyond referring to it as the March 2024 Google core update. The post gives no total count of affected wikis, only named examples plus a rough estimate, and describes no technical mechanism for how Google identifies a domain as brand new. The pattern is also reported as inconsistent, able to lift and reimpose itself on the same domain, so the durability of the subdomain workaround, and Weird Gloop's own redirect plan, remain unproven.
“My best guess (and to be clear, this is a guess): Google decided they could no longer effectively identify and swat away SEO slop, and figured that just massively nerfing brand new domains was their next best option.”
— Weird Gloop's operator, in the post