Google is blackboxy about this and I understand why. SEO is an arms race and there's no advantage to them advertising what they use as signals of "this is a good guy". My blog (on Mediawiki) was deranked to oblivion. Exactly zero of my pages would index on Google. Some of it is that my most read content is about pregnancy and IVF and those are sensitive subjects that google requires some authorship credibility on. That's fair.
But there were other posts that I thought were just normal blog posts of the form that you'd expect to be all right. But none of the search engines wanted anything to do with me. I talked to a friend[0] who told me it was probably something to do with the way MediaWiki was generating certain pages and so on, and I did all the things he recommended:
* edit the sitemap
* switch from the default site.tld/index.php/Page to site.tld/fixed-slug/Page
* put in json+ld info on the page
* put in meta tags
The symptoms were exactly as described here. All pages crawled, zero indexed. The wiki is open to anonymous users, but there's no spam on it (I once had some for an hour before I installed RequestAccount). Finally, my buddy told me that maybe I just need to dump this CMS and use something else. I wondered if perhaps they need you to spend on their ads platform to get it to work so I ran some ads too as an experiment. Some $300 or so. Didn't change a thing.
I really wanted things to be wiki-like so I figured I'd just write and no one would find anything and that's life. But one day I was bored enough that I wrote a wiki bot that reads each recently published page and adds a meta description tag to it.
Now, to be clear, Google does delay reinstatement so that it's not obvious what 'solved' the problem (part of the arms race), but a couple of days later I was back in Google and now I get a small but steady stream of visits from there (I use self-hosted Plausible in cookie-free mode so it's just the Referer [sic] header).
Overall, I get why they're what they are. And maybe there's a bunch of spammy Mediawiki sites out there or something. But I was surprised that a completely legitimate blog would be deranked so aggressively unless a bunch of SEO measures were taken. Fascinating stuff the modern world is.
I suspect it has to do with the Mediawiki because the top-level of the domain was a static site and indexed right away!
But there were other posts that I thought were just normal blog posts of the form that you'd expect to be all right. But none of the search engines wanted anything to do with me. I talked to a friend[0] who told me it was probably something to do with the way MediaWiki was generating certain pages and so on, and I did all the things he recommended:
* edit the sitemap
* switch from the default site.tld/index.php/Page to site.tld/fixed-slug/Page
* put in json+ld info on the page
* put in meta tags
The symptoms were exactly as described here. All pages crawled, zero indexed. The wiki is open to anonymous users, but there's no spam on it (I once had some for an hour before I installed RequestAccount). Finally, my buddy told me that maybe I just need to dump this CMS and use something else. I wondered if perhaps they need you to spend on their ads platform to get it to work so I ran some ads too as an experiment. Some $300 or so. Didn't change a thing.
I really wanted things to be wiki-like so I figured I'd just write and no one would find anything and that's life. But one day I was bored enough that I wrote a wiki bot that reads each recently published page and adds a meta description tag to it.
Now, to be clear, Google does delay reinstatement so that it's not obvious what 'solved' the problem (part of the arms race), but a couple of days later I was back in Google and now I get a small but steady stream of visits from there (I use self-hosted Plausible in cookie-free mode so it's just the Referer [sic] header).
Overall, I get why they're what they are. And maybe there's a bunch of spammy Mediawiki sites out there or something. But I was surprised that a completely legitimate blog would be deranked so aggressively unless a bunch of SEO measures were taken. Fascinating stuff the modern world is.
I suspect it has to do with the Mediawiki because the top-level of the domain was a static site and indexed right away!
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jrhizor