Wiki communities that have migrated off Fandom to brand-new domains since the March 2024 Google core update are facing a major discoverability problem: only their main page appears in Google Search results, a phenomenon dubbed "Google Jail". According to Weird Gloop, the independent host that runs projects such as runescape.wiki and minecraft.wiki, roughly 90% of new wikis launched on fresh domains since that update are affected, including gta.wiki, hollowknight.wiki and the official Path of Exile 2 wiki. Since around 85% of video game wiki traffic comes from Google, the impact on multi-page wikis is severe.
Weird Gloop points out that the issue is not classic duplicate content or poor ranking: the main page often beats Fandom in results, yet no other article is surfaced. The trap can last up to a year and is sometimes broken by large game updates, as happened with Undertale and Vampire Survivors. The hosting service has found that wikis launched on subdomains of established domains (for instance, wiki.leagueoflegends.com or hypixelskyblock.minecraft.wiki) index normally on Google, which is why its newest projects, the Overwatch and Fortnite wikis, have been placed at subdomains of weirdgloop.org instead of their own root domains.
The author criticises the temporary solution aesthetically and stresses it is only a workaround, hoping within around six months to migrate the wikis to their proper domains using 301 redirects and Google's change-of-address tool. The post also appeals to the community for data on the phenomenon and on subdomain migrations to help pin down what is happening.