[sebsebmc]

The Path of Exile wiki made a similar move a few years ago. Fandom was such a limitation for the community and the ads and page speed were awful. Now the Minecraft wiki will have to spend effort beating the Fandom site on SEO so that people get directed to the actually updated wiki. For Path of Exile there was a browser extension that would hide the Fandom from search results and redirect you to the new community wiki.

[sockmeistr]

Are you thinking of the "Indie Wiki Buddy" extension? They have already added support for the new minecraft wiki: https://getindie.wiki/listings/

It's pretty incredible that Fandom/Fextralife have driven people to developing browser extensions just to avoid everything they touch...

[iamacyborg]

No, there's a Path of Exile wiki specific extension also.

It's slightly counterproductive from an SEO perspective as it redirects Fandom clicks to the new wiki, which gives Fandom all the SEO benefits of receiving those clicks.

[eterm]

Indeed, which is I suspect why fandom still ranked so highly above poewiki for many searches for far too long, and initially even appending poewiki would often return no results or just the fandom result.

Thankfully there's been a notable shift in the past 3-6 months.

What has finally helped I think is the sheer amount of stale or missing data on fandom, so as a really basic current example, it doesn't have mention of tattoos, a fairly critical aspect of the current league.

[iamacyborg]

The biggest reason was simply that we were being penalised for having duplicate content, which Google are able to detect.

We definitely over index on content added post-fork, which makes sense given that we're not competing with Fandom for those searches.

According to Google Search console, in the last 3 months we've had 32.9M impressions and 4.39M clicks, which is nothing to sniff at.

[eterm]

Are there any headers added by the extension so you can detect natural vs redirected traffic?

[iamacyborg]

I don't believe so, we never implemented client or server side tracking on the wiki though so it's not like we'd look at it anyway.

[yllautcaj]

Critically, the developers of PoE also provide hosting for the wiki pro-bono. The service is so beneficial for players I imagine they figured the game would benefit from an ad-free (and therefore more usable) community wiki. Personally I have recently started seeing the correct wiki at the top of searches so I think the SEO battle is winnable with community effort. It helps that Fandom wikis are uniquely unusable without an ad blocker running.