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.

Wikia holds many other top level domains which redirect to Wikia.com. For example, the German URL wikia.de redirects to the German homepage on Wikia at de.wikia.com.

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 well 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) Your wiki will benefit from the Wikia brand, as people will realise it is a spam-free stably-hosted site that is or has the potential to be the most popular wiki in on its topic.

Shorter domains and redirect
If your wiki has a longer domain, but has a shorter more fan accepted name, we can setup a domain redirect for you. This is only possible if there are no conflicts with existing wikis, and they are done so at the discretion of Staff.


 * Example of this is http://cityofheroes.wikia.com is also available via http://coh.wikia.com

If your wiki has a common alternate name, we can setup redirects to make sure people searching for those other names get to you also
 * Example: http://cityofvillians.wikia.com (and its mate cov.wikia.com) are both redirects to http://cityofheroes.wikia.com.

Finally, something common for established franchise of movies and games is to add redirects for titles of upcoming releases that are sure to be much searched URLs and terms
 * Example: http://goingrogue.wikia.com -> http://cityofheros.wikia.com for "Going Rogue" expansion for that game.
 * Example: http://burningcrusade.wikia.com -> http://www.wowwiki.com/ for the "Burning Crusade" expansion

These allow you to maximize the amount of searchability of a longer domain, but keep the easy of use of a shorter one.

Corrections
If you need your domain changed, such as correcting a typo from the create process, you can contact Wikia Staff via Special:Contact to have it changed, rather then create a new wiki.