Help:Fandom domain migration

In October 2018, Fandom began the process of migrating wikia.com domains to fandom.com. This process is expected to be completed in early February 2019. This page outlines the reasoning behind the change, the SEO results of the initial migrations, and the schedule for the remaining migrations.

Why are the domains changing?
Wikia rebranded to Fandom in October 2016. The domain migration will complete that process. From an SEO perspective, having the brand name and the domain name be the same ensures stronger SEO across the platform. Google search favors sites that clearly define themselves as something specific. In this case that’s Fandom, a community site based largely around pop culture topics.

How will the change impact my community?
The only visible differences you will notice is the new URL and the fact that, whether logged in or logged out, the domain will have HTTPS support. The existing wikia.com domains will all redirect to fandom.com, so any bookmarks or links across the web will continue to work as they do now.

Beyond that, there will be an initial traffic decrease as Google ingests and adapts to the change. Luckily, in our initial migration of 3,200 communities in October 2018, we found that on average the new fandom.com domains ultimately performed better than the wikia.com domains and overall traffic increased. These results are illustrated this chart showing data from pre- and post-migration.



Although we can’t share page views with you, this chart represents traffic to wikia.com (the blue line) and fandom.com (the orange line). The blue line for wikia.com accounts for September 28th to October 4th, about a month before the migration and far enough away from Labor Day (early September in the United States) so as to not skew the data with holiday traffic. The orange line for fandom.com accounts for December 14th through December 20th, about a month after the migrations were completed and still before the typical traffic upswing that comes over holiday break.

As you can see with these data points, the domains that were migrated to fandom.com are, on average, performing higher than they were on wikia.com. Google favors the fandom.com domain due to its consistency with the brand name, so on average you can expect more readers on your community as a result of the domain migration.

There are some domains that, unfortunately, are not ranking as high as they once did. This is the result of content quality or content architecture issues that are very much resolvable. If you’ve noticed a longer-term decrease in traffic on a migrated community, please feel free to contact us for assistance.

We expect this outcome to hold true in the remaining migrations.

What are the next steps?
Beginning on January 16th, we will perform a “smoke test” with another small set of domains. These will be on lower traffic communities, but this test will allow us to ensure that the technical process we used for the migration in October continues to work as it should. If that assumption is confirmed, we will move onto the final migrations.

Assuming the smoke test goes as well as we expect it to, we will be moving the rest of the Fandom communities to the new domain structure between January 21st and February 4th. This is about 350,000 communities and will complete the fandom.com migration process.

Are all communities moving to Fandom?
No. We will announce this more broadly and in more detail soon, but some communities that don’t quite fit under the definition of fandom.com will have a new domain at wikia.org. The communities moving to wikia.org are ones that focus on medical subjects, advocacy, history, politics, and religion. Examples of future wikia.org domains would include cancer.wikia.org, lgbt.wikia.org, world-war-2.wikia.org, and bible.wikia.org.

This new domain reflects the fact that not every community is about a pop culture, hobby, or fandom-related subject, with many based around creating awareness of or spreading knowledge about important historical or social topics. Fandom staff is currently compiling a list of communities that will be migrated to wikia.org, a process that will be continued throughout January and February. The wikia.org migration will occur after February 4th, once the fandom.com migration is completed.

We don’t have any plans to open up wiki creation on wikia.org, but new wikis created in the future that qualify for wikia.org can be migrated by Fandom upon request.

I have a question that wasn’t answered here
If you have any questions or concerns about this process that were not addressed on this page, please feel free to send staff a message at Special:Contact or directly via email at community@fandom.com. We will do our best to answer those for you!

Further help and feedback
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