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When Wikia/Fandom is Your Competitor
I’ve run a site devoted to a media property for many years. Our wiki in particular is a major source of traffic, and at one point was probably _the_ most visited destination on the internet for our property. Then, Wikia.com (now Fandom.com) started pushing resources into developing their competing wiki, and in time they relegated us to #2 for a lot of organic search traffic.
We are now finding ourselves in a similar position related to the fact that we are #1 for a lot of searches related to a new iteration of said property, but we can see that Fandom will make the push to take over those spots.
So, my question is… what we can we do? We’ve done many things to try and optimize according to various SEO audits, but there are limits — we’re on MediaWiki, a platform that is not particularly SEO-friendly, and we don’t want to massage content in weird ways to try and eke out a little more link juice.
Does anyone else have experience with having a site in the same niche as a Wikia/Fandom wiki? Did you just live with it, or can it be combatted?
Thanks!
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4 Replies
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I don’t have experience over it but I will like to know that though you have media wiki, do you have any way blog type section for publishing related quality content?
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It really depends. Is your wiki better than theirs? If not, your first step should be to update your content to be more extensive and more useful than your competitor.
If your content is better, then you might need to go about beating them by getting relevant backlinks.
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Maybe try and add some more subjective / “sensationalist” content as they will most likely have straight up, dry facts.
I am in this position on a couple of travel sites, where I have to compete against the official tourist boards. I get good enough traffic in second place, but it’s frustrating knowing I have the better content but people just link to the official site without thinking.
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I suggest you to watermark your images. Fandom is blatantly stealing them. And yes, I can send you some references by PM (only to accounts not belonging to Fandom of course).
