Independent wiki hosting platform Weird Gloop has identified a significant problem with Google Search: new domains launched since March 2024 struggle to get indexed for anything beyond their main page.
According to the platform’s founder, this “Google Jail” affects approximately 90% of wikis launched on new domains after Google’s March 2024 core update. Affected sites include gta.wiki, hollowknight.wiki, and the official Path of Exile 2 wiki. This is particularly damaging because roughly 85% of video game wiki traffic originates from Google Search, and wikis typically drive engagement through internal pages rather than homepages.
The issue persists regardless of whether wiki content is entirely new or migrated from existing sources like Fandom, ruling out conventional duplicate-content problems. The duration of the “jail” is unclear—some wikis recover within months, while others remain trapped for up to a year. A few wikis, including Undertale and Vampire Survivors, escaped the problem following major game updates that drove significant new traffic.
Interestingly, the ranking mechanism appears independent of domain registration age; Google’s indexing date seems to matter more. Affected pages are often still crawled and can be found through site-specific searches, just not in regular Google results.
Weird Gloop’s response has been pragmatic: launching new wikis on subdomains of established domains instead. Wikis hosted at locations like overwatch.weirdgloop.org show immediate indexing success across multiple pages, even when using domains with minimal existing authority. This contrasts sharply with the failure mode on new root domains.
The founder speculates that Google may have adopted aggressive new-domain penalties as a blanket strategy against SEO spam, though this remains unconfirmed. The workaround creates an aesthetic problem—using the Weird Gloop domain for user-facing wikis contradicts the platform’s philosophy of independent wiki branding. However, the team hopes to eventually migrate these wikis to their intended domains once they accumulate sufficient Google authority, using 301 redirects to preserve search ranking.
Key facts
- Since March 2024, new wikis on new domains show only their homepage in Google Search results
- About 90% of wikis launched on brand-new domains since the March 2024 Google update are affected
- Video game wikis derive roughly 85% of traffic from Google Search
- Wikis hosted on subdomains of established domains bypass the indexing problem entirely
- The issue duration is unclear, ranging from months to over a year, and sometimes resolves after major game updates