Help:Domain name

Most Wikia sites are hosted on a subdomain of Wikia.com. Subdomain names are usually generic words and search terms so that people can easily find or guess the location of a Wikia. For example, a Wikia about education would be at education.wikia.com.

Wikia on the same topic in multiple languages may use the same subdomain name, with the language code added before the subdomain. For example, the French Macintosh wiki is at fr.mac.wikia.com. Wikia can also use local terms without language codes in the URL: for bicycle riders, the English wiki is at cycling.wikia.com while the French one is at cyclisme.wikia.com.

When a new wiki is requested, a name for the wiki can be specified. This will be used as the subdomain name.

Advantages of using a Wikia domain name

 * 1) You can have a generic name, such as education, for your wiki rather than needing to find a free domain name or use an obscure word.
 * 2) Your wiki will be ranked better and more quickly by search engines and directories, since the Wikia domain as a whole is already indexed, its ranking is very high, and each wiki has a custom site map which is submitted to Google regularly.
 * 3) You never need to worry about renewing the domain name, or the increasing costs of domain registration.
 * 4) You don't need to worry about whether someone else has registered the .org or .co.uk of your domain when you've only bought the .com version. This leads to less chance of people going to the wrong top level domain.
 * 5) The wiki will be obviously part of the Wikia brand, so people instantly know the site is openly editable, GFDL licensed, properly spam controlled, and not about to disappear.

Exceptions
A few large wikis which were located on their own servers before moving to Wikia are still using their old domain names by special arrangement. This includes the Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha, the Wikipedia parody site Uncyclopedia, the World of Warcraft site WoWWiki, and the Final Fantasy XI wiki FFXIclopedia.

There are no other exceptions to the domain name policy of Wikia at this time.


 * To learn why these large wikis joined the Wikia family, see Why use Wikia?.