Overwatch and Fortnite wikis leave Fandom for Weird Gloop, dodging Google's new-domain penalty

Overwatch and Fortnite wikis find a new home

The Overwatch and Fortnite wikis have left Fandom and are now hosted by Weird Gloop, the independent organisation that already runs runescape.wiki, minecraft.wiki and gta.wiki. According to a Weird Gloop blog post that reached the Hacker News front page, both launched as subdomains of weirdgloop.org rather than on standalone addresses like overwatch.wiki. That decision is a deliberate workaround for a Google Search behaviour the post calls "Google Jail".

What "Google Jail" does to new wiki domains

Since a Google core update in March 2024, wikis hosted on brand-new domains generally show only their main page in Google results, Weird Gloop reports. Every other page — the character guides, item tables and patch notes that make up most of a wiki — stays invisible regardless of quality. With roughly 85% of video game wiki traffic arriving via Google, per the post, that outcome is close to fatal for a freshly migrated community.

The post estimates that about 90% of wikis launched on fresh domains since that update have been hit, including gta.wiki and hytalewiki.org, which Weird Gloop itself hosts, hollowknight.wiki, the official Path of Exile 2 wiki, and a couple of dozen smaller projects. Several patterns stand out. It happens whether the content is original or imported from a site Google already indexes, so it is not the familiar duplicate-content problem. A jailed wiki's main page can even outrank Fandom's equivalent while no other page from the domain appears at all. The block lasts for an unclear period, sometimes up to a year, can switch on and off intermittently, and occasionally gets broken by a major game update that floods the wiki with new traffic and content — as happened with the Undertale and Vampire Survivors wikis. The trigger seems to be when Google first indexed the domain rather than how long ago it was registered, and the author found no trace of the behaviour before March 2024.

The author's explanation, offered explicitly as a guess, is that Google concluded it could no longer reliably identify SEO junk page by page and opted instead to suppress new domains wholesale.

Why subdomains sidestep the problem

Wikis launched on subdomains of established domains have fared far better. Weird Gloop points to wiki.leagueoflegends.com, wiki.warframe.com and hypixelskyblock.minecraft.wiki as launches whose articles were indexed normally from day one. Even overwatch.weirdgloop.org, live for only a week when the post was written, was already getting pages indexed better than any wiki currently stuck in the penalty.

That leaves communities leaving Fandom with three options, none of them ideal: take the natural root domain and accept being buried in search; try to negotiate a studio-hosted address such as wiki.overwatch.com, which works out roughly half the time; or launch under a subdomain of a domain that already has search authority. Weird Gloop has been gravitating toward the third.

The organisation admits the branding is awkward, since it dislikes exposing an inside-joke name to the general public. The plan, based on experiments so far, is to let each wiki build search equity on the subdomain and then move it to its intended home — a 301 redirect plus Google's change-of-address tool could, the author hopes, shift overwatch.weirdgloop.org to overwatch.wiki within about six months.

Why it matters

Fandom's ad-saturated pages have pushed community after community to fork their wikis, but for roughly two years Google's treatment of new domains has been quietly starving those escapes of readers: people search, find only the abandoned Fandom copy, and the fork never gains traction. The subdomain workaround changes the economics of leaving, which is why two of gaming's biggest wikis now sit under weirdgloop.org. But it also concentrates power in whoever owns the established domain, and it depends entirely on undocumented, unacknowledged Google behaviour. Weird Gloop is asking wiki operators and SEO practitioners with data on the phenomenon — or on later moves from a subdomain to a root domain — to reach out via its Discord.