An update on Fandom and Gamepedia domain migrations
Update (March 4th): Remaining Gamepedia wikis will begin their migrations soon.
Hey gang!
I wanted to give you an update on how the Gamepedia to Fandom domain migration testing has gone and what our next steps are for this work.
Since the initial migration of wikis in the test group back in November, we have been monitoring the effect of the migration on inbound traffic to these wikis from Google. As a reminder for context, the initial migration set included wikis where Project Crossover had largely been completed and the affected wikis for archival with -archive.fandom.com had little traffic.
In monitoring the moves in the first five weeks, we noticed that established, active Gamepedia wikis moving to Fandom URLs held their traffic without mu…
Evolving with the Web: Keeping Google Happy
Hey gang!
Hope you all had safe and joyous holidays :)
As 2021 kicks off, let’s talk about search engine optimization (SEO) or, most succinctly, Keeping Google Happy. Some of you already know this, but it bears repeating often: search results account for the overwhelming majority of visits to the platform, with 90% of total traffic to the wikis originating from Google searches. It is the primary source of any established wiki’s traffic by a wide margin. There are no exceptions. None. This is a result of Google recognizing that the Fandom platform of wikis is the #1 authority on imagined worlds and, thus, reward your wikis with top search results. It is a fantastic way to attract an audience which is intently interested in the content covered …
State of Video 2020
Hey gang!
It has been just over a year since we introduced The Loop as our new video series going into the JW Player at the top of select wiki pages, in many cases replacing the Featured Video content from years past. As we continue to gather data and experiment with different video types, I wanted to give you a recap of the work we have done and what you can expect from us in 2021.
For those of you who are new, JW Player is a video unit which shows up at the top of an article page for logged out users (and logged in users who set their preferences as such) once per community visit and plays The Loop or Featured Video content. What is The Loop? It is a weekly, vertical-specific mini show produced by Fandom’s original content team to cover th…
Discussions search is now available
Hey gang!
Today, I am thrilled to announce that a long-requested feature is getting its first release: search for Discussions posts!
New in the Special:Search page on the Unified Community Platform is a Posts option which allows you to search through Discussions posts. This has been a major user request since we first launched Discussions.
For now, default search behavior will not change, so you’ll need to enter Special:Search to get to the Post search tab. This first release is desktop-only and will not include Discussions results in the Everything tab or advanced search options. Next year, we plan to start experimenting to see how we can best surface relevant Discussions content in additional ways while respecting user intent with their sear…
A change to Blogs on Community Central
Hey gang!
Just a short announcement from me today. We have changed the permission set on Community Central today and restricted the blog creation permission to moderators and up. This is due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of blogs created on Community Central are either spam or in the wrong place.
This is the first step we’re taking in a multi-step plan with our admin team to make Community Central more focused and less noisy.
The ability to reply to blog posts is unchanged. The ability to create blog posts on your wikis has not changed. This was simply about creating new blog posts on this specific wiki.
Thanks!