User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/How we're testing the fandom.com domain migration/@comment-26335203-20181010024804/@comment-20644-20181018013410

I said this in another comment too a few minutes ago but Google Trends isn't a good guide for how well a site is performing, which is why very few marketers use only that tool. We lean on Google’s Keyword planner from the paid platform to rely on search impressions over Google Trends, which only tracks changes in popularity rather than what people are actually searching for.

That’s a big reason why the chart in the link that you provided showing Wikia, Fandom, and Wiki doesn’t really tell a compelling story. Interest in a term is trended data. All 3 of those could represent a grand total of 50 searches per month (with 1 for Fandom, 3 for Wikia, and 46 for Wiki) and it would still show that chart the exact same way. It’s not factoring in what people are searching for or actual traffic.

There’s also user intent. Typically, users don’t search for our brand, regardless whether it’s Fandom or Wikia. They search for a topic, and Fandom’s SEO power is what drives wiki results to the top which brings people into the site. Wiki itself is something that people typically only search for when they’re looking to create one. So if you want to create a wiki, the user intent in that search is likely about creating one.

As your chart shows, that intent has been dropping over time, which we’re aware of. What we see in that data, though, is that wiki intent was up several years ago because of a lack of competition for building a website where you can create great, in-depth content. Compared to 10 years ago, there are a lot more options now for content creation. Search terms have changed to reflect that. In the aggregate, you’ll probably find more searches for WordPress, Tumblr, and Medium than you would for wiki.

That doesn’t mean that actual wikis are being hurt, though, or that they are somehow decreasing in popularity. Quite the contrary, the number of people using wikis here has been trending upward for a while despite interest in the term wiki decreasing. That’s not unusual either. Take Web 2.0 as an example. No one says that anymore. They say social media. That doesn’t mean that the concept or entity has gone away.

You also can’t use keywords like Fandom, Wikia, and Wiki against each other because Google doesn’t really prioritize keywords anymore. That’s why if you try to fill your site with keywords meant to capture quick traffic, it’s probably not going to work and Google’s going to notice what you’re doing and not like that very much.

Google groups concepts together and serves not the user’s query, but what they believe is the user’s intent. If I search for pizza at 6pm, they’re going to show me local pizza places and not an article defining what a pizza is because they’re pretty sure I want to order pizza. Likewise, if I search for black panther after searching for black jaguar, they will probably show me pictures of an animal and not the Marvel movie.