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.
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?
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?
This is a common issue for game communities too. Discord works better for bringing together game communities not only because it's a more active and responsive experience, but because it's a centralized platform where users are already spending time across multiple communities. But chat's not publicly indexed, so lots of valuable game knowledge Q&A isn't accessible through search engines.
I'm working with a game studio that's self-hosting their most recent game (Cyber Knights: Flashpoint)'s wiki for the first time: https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/
It's going well content-wise, but it's insane how hard it's been to get it ranking in search results at all, much less outrank Fandom.
I canceled Soylent a couple of years ago after two silently-failing billing errors within a year and a rude customer service response. Looking for replacements, I ended up going with Huel.
It's been fine; I have had a couple of bad batches (too salty / bitter), but they replaced them. Switching from Soylent's ready-made drinks to Huel's mix-with-water powder was a small adjustment, but Huel's shaker bottle makes it easy. Soylent was fine unflavored for me (I'd describe it as "cheerio milk"), but with Huel their "original" flavor wasn't doing it for me so I've been ordering the chocolate. It's 1g of sugar, which doesn't bother me.
I'm just using it for a daily breakfast shake. I've never been that hungry in the mornings so can't comment on if you'll feel sated by it, but it works for me as a way to get some easy nutrition.
I'd encourage you to expand the book-promoting paragraph to include a bit more info / some interest-generating hooks about what the book offers that the article itself hasn't already provided.
If you really want to make this model sustainable long-term I might even make the recommendation paragraph dynamically customized based on referring source (here's a WordPress plugin that would let you do this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/if-so/). History enthusiasts are likely to be intrigued by a different set of things from the book than HN's business & systems-thinkers or an RPG community interested in world-building inspiration.
Lots of people will read a general-interest article (quick & no cost), but to get conversions to an actual sale, you need to target specific interests.
Well for one, the trend is hugely toward people consuming media on mobile devices, where resources like processor power and battery life are much more limited and unsuited to effective crypto mining than even a standard PC is.
Neither my business partner nor I are any good at marketing. And we didn't like how most sites put so much pressure on their users to buy things, click ads, share with friends, send out marketing emails, etc...so the things we DID put in were kind of halfhearted, and always out of the way.
We tried selling the data (amazing data if you think about it!!). Anonymous of course! And/or selling the recommendations (easy enough since everything was organized by UPC/ISBN). But that's something it seems like you need to know people -- CEO's/CTO's of bigger companies. We just didn't have the connections, nor the personalities to kiss that much ass. But we tried for several years. I think they're all of the mindset that they've got "good enough" data on their own...or two guys in their garage are too small peanuts to trust. It's funny that just this week Amazon had a post here about it's 20th year of recommendation engine, ~yey~ -- and they still can't get it right (sour grapes? yeah...).
If we were to do it again, we'd probably focus on core functions (the site did A LOT). And seriously work on marketing aspects. Not dark patterns (https://darkpatterns.org/) but more organized and focused efforts.
Honestly though, if we did it again, it would not be for the money - it would be for a cool product and for our own fun...maybe integrate with Kodi...
We'd be smarter on hosting. We were at Rackspace first for $30k/mo...then realized we were being hoodwinked and found PEER1 for $1200/mo...then realized we could get away with a $300/mo DO droplet by converting everything to open source and optimizing -- granted over the course of the 8-10 years, tech improved. But, no more MSSQL, no paid search engine (we ended up on Solr -- AMAZING!), no Windows and just all open-source. I ran our recommendation engine on my computers at home and uploaded results from there. As with hosting, I think the open source stack has improved a lot.
Smarter on who we hire for PR - I got all our serious PR (Mashable, LifeHacker, Makeuseof, etc). We spend about $30k on snake-oil PR companies. Our first PR company took $20k and literally did nothing (not even a press release blast or PDF) - but suing would cost us way too much time/money so we ate it and went to another referral - who did the job, but it ended up more or less a pointless exercise.
After all that time, going into personal debt -- with creditors calling at all hours, no income in sight, thousands of hours devoted to it, alienating friends and family borrowing from them to survive, we finally decided to call it quits.
Could you talk a bit about what you've done to promote it? Or has it been a hands-off, 'whatever traffic the marketplace provides organically' kinda thing?
I'm curious if other assistive software solves this need at the OS level, or if you other similar tools are already known to the community that it would be useful for.
Windows has built-in speech control that lets you scroll and click, doesn't it?
We have an EdTech accelerator here, LearnLaunch, with a program specifically for scaling startups that are already growing after achieving product-market fit: http://learnlaunch.com/x/#programs
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.