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Comment by EcommerceFlow | Hacker News Reader

Google giving Fandom powerful rankings bothers me too, since their intrusive ads clearly go against Google ranking factors.

Still, I'm glad for some competition. However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?

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Just as an example - the stardew valley offical wiki is massive and complete, and nearly everyone uses that, but google still directs users to the fandom site for almost any specific search. Its one of the main things that has led me to think that using Google gives far less useful information than competitors.

That goes against Google's 2010 ranking factors. 2024 Google is all about pushing DoubleClick customers to the top of the front page.

One of the first sites I downrank in kagi is all the fandom sites. I don't outright ban them, sometimes they're all there is, but I try and make it so any other result shows up ahead of them

https://getindie.wiki/ this has been a really helpful extension for me.

I assume that Fandom pays Google for that placement

Theoretically, you can't pay for placement on Google without it being labelled an ad.

Practically, you can pay SEO experts to help you keep your rankings up.

If Google were to have the astoundingly poor business sense to secretly allow payment for higher 'organic' search rankings: they'd hopefully at least have the good sense to not blow that secret on a fish as small as Fandom.

How so? Fandom seems to have Google ads. We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher. Google's search ranking is black box. Edit: I guess at great effort you could scrape thousands of sites, not if they remove or add Google ads, and track their rating.

I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.

> We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher

This to me is a different argument, though admittedly reasonable to arrive at through the language of "paying Google for placement".

> I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.

I mean, yes. Though I should hope I needn't preamble any statement about <company> with how cynical I am about their intentions... It's not relevant here because I'm not arguing on the grounds that 'Google would be ethical and kawaii if they didn't accept payment for organic search ranking'--I'm saying that from a business standpoint it wouldn't make sense.

Ok sure I might have misunderstood you. I agree that Fandom is most likely not writing checks or paying directly in other means to Google for increased search rank.

The black box leaked recently.

https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousa...

a relative of mine worked for a company who were explicitly paying Google for higher "organic" search results

They don’t need to. Fandom benefits from being an old and popular site. Google manually adjusts their ranking to prioritize such sites, because they think those sites are what the “average” searcher expects to see come up when they search certain topics.

Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will think Google is broken if certain popular sites don’t come up in their results.

> However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?

Yes, per this post:

> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.

...

> If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi[1]

1: https://weirdgloop.org/contact

Super confusing as to why not? How else would they achieve their goal.

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