Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with <10k players, recently had to disable new signups, because the spam was so bad (and it was stuck on an old version of MediaWiki, which didn't have CAPTCHA-support).
On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as a source of such malware.
I imagine the fix for the OP is a thorough audit/cleansing of all malicious content on the wiki, followed by some sort of appeal to Google (which will no doubt take months, if they even respond at all, because ... Google).
Really OP's only hope is that the Google team responsible for this has an Italian Pokemon fan; otherwise they are probably screwed.
Social sites should have all have a tree-based invite system. This would allow wiping out spammers and their enablers in a single hit. It would allow vetting of good actors too.
You still need criteria to handle reputation: does an account invited years ago and now spamming affects the reputation of the inviter, how much? What about the hacked accounts?
For small platforms it makes a lot of sense, for larger the potential for abuse is still there in different forms.
I feel like the dream solution is more like tree-based content: you see content that is vouched for by people you vouch for; if someone's account is compromised then their vouches get updated to not matter anymore, cutting their whole tree off at the root to make it invisible. Spammers should end up in largely disconnected components of the trees.
We have very good anti-bot system set up with a good number of Cloudflare fine-tuned rules, limited permissions for newly created accounts, and a very dedicated team of volunteers that patrol the recent edits constantly. I cannot exclude that somewhere on a rarely visited page (out of 37k+) there is a spam link, but I doubt it’s the reason for the deindexing. I think this would also appear on the Google Search Console.
An organization I'm involved with has had to add Anubis (https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis) because of the recent wiki attacks from LLM scrapers. It's finally fixed our outages.
Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.
Google's always adjusting its search rankings, but it's rare for a legitimate site to suffer such a sudden massive hit without reason.
My first thought would be that they accidentally blocked Google's crawler (maybe through some kind of anti-AI setting?) or that Google believes that the site is serving malware or spam. Either scenario can have that kind of effect. I can see that their forum at least appears to have strong Cloudflare anti-bot rules in place, so that might be the case.
They're also using a subdomain for both their wiki and forum, which Google has been observed to punish. They might consider moving each of those to their own separate .com domain.
But aside from that usual stuff, there's one more possible reason that's specific to this site. In November of last year, the Pokemon Company rebranded their "Pokemon Trainer Club" to "Pokemon Trainer Central", which is the first result that comes up when you search for "Pokemon Central".
That change was made a few months before the sudden drop in traffic, but could still be a viable explanation here. Google does routine re-ranking on a daily basis along with occasional major re-ranking, which happens maybe a few times a year, so the delayed hit that they saw could have come from Google finally recognizing that most people who search for "Pokemon Central" are no longer looking for the wiki like was once true in the past.
Wikis are just high-risk for SEO. Getting my own personal wiki to be indexed was such a challenge that I'd just about given up when a friend who is more acquainted with the whole thing helped me make sure I had all the bits and bobs in the right place. If you're not careful, people can easily put spam all over your site and then it'll really ruin your presence on a search engine.
Google is really big, though. Really really big. They're so big that not even all the people inside Google are trustworthy to them on a subject like this.
But they don't universally hate wikis and so on. It's just you have to do a lot of work and make sure you don't have spam on your wiki, and then fill in all of the information in your meta tags, and have a sitemap.xml, and all that. Here's my wiki for example: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/8/89/Screenshot_-_Goo...
The same thing happened with my blog a few weeks ago. It was well referenced for years and suddenly almost all of my entries are not indexed anymore. The Search Console indicates that the URLs were crawled but are currently not indexed, and contrary to technical problems, there nothing I can do to fix it, I just have to accept that most of my articles cannot be found via Google anymore.
EDIT: I don't actually think it is related, but now that I think of it, the timing corresponds with when I started setting up TDMRep to forbid using my content to train LLMs.
Same. I've been running a personal blog for over 20 years. Last year, I couldn't find any links to my blog on Google. Went to Google Search Console to find all my links are "Crawled by not indexed", with no reason given.
It appears for me when I search for it. Even Gemini is cool with looking for it.
Here is a part of the Gemini result I got which was directly above the regular result link.
"Pokémon Central is a major community network and independent Italian encyclopedia for everything Pokémon-related"
Honestly, the title is super clickbait and it doesn't even reflect reality.
Its so easy picking some giant entity far away and create some drama about it. Dont get me wrong, I am not a google fan, but I also dislike clickbaits and whiney dramatic claims, moreover if unverified.
Google neither hates nor loves any of us, the only thing it cares about as an institution is cramming as many advertisements in front of as many people as it can get away with to generate increasingly ridiculous piles of money.
This is not meant to be a defense of Google, which is (like virtually every large corporation) completely sociopathic.
I'm not sure most of those calling the shots at Google realizes they even have paying customers other than advertisers. Notably though, website publishers and consumers of their massive products like Search, Gmail, and Android are not really customers.
Public corporations were multicellular biological organisms made up of individual cells working toward the collective goal of continuing the organism's existence. Each cell received nourishment from the corporation, in the form of monetary compensation and other benefits. Some cells have a more direct role in the "reasoning" process of the organism than others.
These organisms aren't collectively sentient, though it could be argued some of the constituent cells are. They are able to influence their environment by using individual cellular consciousnesses to communicate with conscious constituent cells in other organisms.
Ultimately, the organism itself has the goal of producing value for its owners. The methods the organism used to achieve these goals are somewhat opaque to the owners, and potentially inscrutable to the individual constituent cells. If the owners stop receiving value the organism becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.
Recently these organisms have become biological / technological hybrids including unconscious computational models in their reasoning process. That increases the inscrutability and opacity of the process by which it reasons. It's likely the unconscious computational models will eventually be tasked with communicating with similar models in other organisms, at which point the inscrutability will probably increase by an even greater amount.
To be honest it's probably just jank on Google's end.
There's a lot of delayed cause and effect in search, and it's much easier to make a minor mistake that excludes 0.1% of websites from crawling or indexing than it is to detect that it's happened except from affected websites telling you about it.
My guess is that the combination of Wiki and Pokemon is highly suspect for Google.
The Pokemon Industrial Complex has advanced astroturfing especially on YouTube/Twitch, where streamers mention the damn things in any second episode, they "accidentally" meet people going to Pokemon conventions in live streams and so on.
No, I think "us" is apt, considering this will eventually affect all sites that rely on traffic from Google search, which is basically every text heavy site.
All we can hope for is that people will stop using search (after eventually having enough of the AI wave) for these sort of niche sites and will bookmark and access them directly in future. I don't have much hope.
I spend a lot of time wondering about the true role of search in people's lives in 2026. When I watch people use the Internet, it seems like most of them perform searches simply as fuzzy-matching navigation to the websites they use. Like the way many people use Spotlight to launch desktop apps.
I think this is because
(A) bookmarks lists are inconvenient - scrolling to find a bookmark is slower than typing "youtube" or (cringe) "bank of america" in the URL bar
(B) typing URLs directly requires precision of memory with TLDs being numerous and even things that were once predictable are now mere suggestions (e.g. is your city or town at cityofwhatever.com? city.org? city.gov? Could be anything!)
(C) related to (B) if you screw up a full URL you may well end up at a phishing site that looks like the site you wanted.
I really believe that 90% of Google and Bing searches today are probably for the names (or misspelled or partial names) of the top 100 websites.
If the dominant browsers weren't Google Chrome and Mobile Safari (who gets paid by Google for every search) browsers would build bookmarks for you of your frequently-used sites, and ordered by frequency of visits, present those for direct navigation when you type a word in the search bar, and not send any query to a search engine if you chose one of those. But all incentives point very strongly against doing that and toward sending you to a SERP with 13 ads and an "AI Overview" above the organic results.
Pokemon Central runs ads (Google AdSense at that!), which is probably how they pay for everything.
Google is likely their biggest inbound source of traffic, so they're probably experiencing a marked revenue drop as well.
It's unfortunate that so many livelihoods are subject to the capricious whims of a single company. A company that is increasingly seeking to keep users on their engine without sending eyeballs or revenue to any third parties at all.
We're watching Google's "embrace-extend-extinguish" arc for the web. It's not over by a long shot, but they absolutely intend to finish the job.
Why is it a lot of work? Could you specify some
off the more difficult effort? Wouldn’t LLMs help speed this up? This is the one area where I’d think Llms could really take Google down by empowering in house ad platforms.
Depends on how in-house you want to go. If you go full in-house, you'll need sales staff to make deals with advertisers. You'll then need a way of hosting the media provided. You'll need a way to deal with media that does not match what you've requested. You'll need a system to allocate ad space accordingly to contracts with ad clients. It's like a whole new department in your company.
I don’t have a sales staff. I just call a company, tell them why I’m calling and what’s the opportunity, crack some jokes, get serious and make them an offer. It helps that I’m in a niche, thoroughly know the sector and that they most likely already know my websites. As long as I can get to the owner of the company, then I’m golden.
We would like the wiki to be free of ads, but hosting costs at our scale are real. Since we don’t like ads either, we compromise like this: users can register for free and never see an ad (they are only served to anonymous visitors); they can also use an ad blocker and we won’t bug them about it.
Perhaps they will investigate why 541,000 pages aren’t being indexed. In my experience, Google provides adequate tools for identifying and resolving indexing issues.
Google won’t serve pages it hasn’t indexed. Seems they left a lot of relevant details out of that tweet.
Edit: and the most likely answer would be that their current robots.txt disallows virtually all indexing. I’m no SEO expert but entries like this seem like footguns:
In the first image you can see how indexed pages go from 40k+ to 11 in the matter of days. Further down the thread I show how 114k+ pages are marked as “crawled but not index” and we can’t understand why. The rest is stuff that is (correctly) blocked by robots.txt.
I thought the image was graphing impressions so fair enough. I still don’t see how this is obviously a Google problem. Webmasters mess up the indexability of their sites all the time. More info needed.
They’ve clearly been messing with their robots.txt so most likely Google is simply respecting that.
They're a wiki. Wiki spammers are relentless now.
Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with <10k players, recently had to disable new signups, because the spam was so bad (and it was stuck on an old version of MediaWiki, which didn't have CAPTCHA-support).
On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as a source of such malware.
I imagine the fix for the OP is a thorough audit/cleansing of all malicious content on the wiki, followed by some sort of appeal to Google (which will no doubt take months, if they even respond at all, because ... Google).
Really OP's only hope is that the Google team responsible for this has an Italian Pokemon fan; otherwise they are probably screwed.
Social sites should have all have a tree-based invite system. This would allow wiping out spammers and their enablers in a single hit. It would allow vetting of good actors too.
That’s literally how Facebook started
I remember begging my older step brother for an invite since he had the college email to get in
Interesting to compare this site and lobste.rs for that
Both from safety and volume perspectives, I’d imagine. Openness has value.
You still need criteria to handle reputation: does an account invited years ago and now spamming affects the reputation of the inviter, how much? What about the hacked accounts?
For small platforms it makes a lot of sense, for larger the potential for abuse is still there in different forms.
I feel like the dream solution is more like tree-based content: you see content that is vouched for by people you vouch for; if someone's account is compromised then their vouches get updated to not matter anymore, cutting their whole tree off at the root to make it invisible. Spammers should end up in largely disconnected components of the trees.
Now you just created a market for farmed "legit" accounts.
We have very good anti-bot system set up with a good number of Cloudflare fine-tuned rules, limited permissions for newly created accounts, and a very dedicated team of volunteers that patrol the recent edits constantly. I cannot exclude that somewhere on a rarely visited page (out of 37k+) there is a spam link, but I doubt it’s the reason for the deindexing. I think this would also appear on the Google Search Console.
An organization I'm involved with has had to add Anubis (https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis) because of the recent wiki attacks from LLM scrapers. It's finally fixed our outages.
Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.
>wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.
So same thing ad-block users have been doing for 20 years now?
Google's always adjusting its search rankings, but it's rare for a legitimate site to suffer such a sudden massive hit without reason.
My first thought would be that they accidentally blocked Google's crawler (maybe through some kind of anti-AI setting?) or that Google believes that the site is serving malware or spam. Either scenario can have that kind of effect. I can see that their forum at least appears to have strong Cloudflare anti-bot rules in place, so that might be the case.
They're also using a subdomain for both their wiki and forum, which Google has been observed to punish. They might consider moving each of those to their own separate .com domain.
But aside from that usual stuff, there's one more possible reason that's specific to this site. In November of last year, the Pokemon Company rebranded their "Pokemon Trainer Club" to "Pokemon Trainer Central", which is the first result that comes up when you search for "Pokemon Central".
That change was made a few months before the sudden drop in traffic, but could still be a viable explanation here. Google does routine re-ranking on a daily basis along with occasional major re-ranking, which happens maybe a few times a year, so the delayed hit that they saw could have come from Google finally recognizing that most people who search for "Pokemon Central" are no longer looking for the wiki like was once true in the past.
https://gonintendo.com/contents/54863-pokemon-trainer-club-r...
Wikis are just high-risk for SEO. Getting my own personal wiki to be indexed was such a challenge that I'd just about given up when a friend who is more acquainted with the whole thing helped me make sure I had all the bits and bobs in the right place. If you're not careful, people can easily put spam all over your site and then it'll really ruin your presence on a search engine.
Google is really big, though. Really really big. They're so big that not even all the people inside Google are trustworthy to them on a subject like this.
But they don't universally hate wikis and so on. It's just you have to do a lot of work and make sure you don't have spam on your wiki, and then fill in all of the information in your meta tags, and have a sitemap.xml, and all that. Here's my wiki for example: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/8/89/Screenshot_-_Goo...
The same thing happened with my blog a few weeks ago. It was well referenced for years and suddenly almost all of my entries are not indexed anymore. The Search Console indicates that the URLs were crawled but are currently not indexed, and contrary to technical problems, there nothing I can do to fix it, I just have to accept that most of my articles cannot be found via Google anymore.
EDIT: I don't actually think it is related, but now that I think of it, the timing corresponds with when I started setting up TDMRep to forbid using my content to train LLMs.
Same. I've been running a personal blog for over 20 years. Last year, I couldn't find any links to my blog on Google. Went to Google Search Console to find all my links are "Crawled by not indexed", with no reason given.
It appears for me when I search for it. Even Gemini is cool with looking for it.
Here is a part of the Gemini result I got which was directly above the regular result link.
"Pokémon Central is a major community network and independent Italian encyclopedia for everything Pokémon-related"
Honestly, the title is super clickbait and it doesn't even reflect reality. Its so easy picking some giant entity far away and create some drama about it. Dont get me wrong, I am not a google fan, but I also dislike clickbaits and whiney dramatic claims, moreover if unverified.
Do you suspect they have faked the search console screenshots as well? Make your accusation explicit.
I can even tell you that Google hates us all
Google neither hates nor loves any of us, the only thing it cares about as an institution is cramming as many advertisements in front of as many people as it can get away with to generate increasingly ridiculous piles of money.
This is not meant to be a defense of Google, which is (like virtually every large corporation) completely sociopathic.
All large companies are sociopaths, but few tech companies treat their paying customers with the level of contempt that Google does.
I'm not sure most of those calling the shots at Google realizes they even have paying customers other than advertisers. Notably though, website publishers and consumers of their massive products like Search, Gmail, and Android are not really customers.
Public corporations were multicellular biological organisms made up of individual cells working toward the collective goal of continuing the organism's existence. Each cell received nourishment from the corporation, in the form of monetary compensation and other benefits. Some cells have a more direct role in the "reasoning" process of the organism than others.
These organisms aren't collectively sentient, though it could be argued some of the constituent cells are. They are able to influence their environment by using individual cellular consciousnesses to communicate with conscious constituent cells in other organisms.
Ultimately, the organism itself has the goal of producing value for its owners. The methods the organism used to achieve these goals are somewhat opaque to the owners, and potentially inscrutable to the individual constituent cells. If the owners stop receiving value the organism becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.
Recently these organisms have become biological / technological hybrids including unconscious computational models in their reasoning process. That increases the inscrutability and opacity of the process by which it reasons. It's likely the unconscious computational models will eventually be tasked with communicating with similar models in other organisms, at which point the inscrutability will probably increase by an even greater amount.
To be honest it's probably just jank on Google's end.
There's a lot of delayed cause and effect in search, and it's much easier to make a minor mistake that excludes 0.1% of websites from crawling or indexing than it is to detect that it's happened except from affected websites telling you about it.
You guys made the classic SEO mistake of building a real community site instead of a Reddit thread, a coupon subfolder, or an AI summary.
Scherzi a parte, spero che possiate recuperare presto…
Grazie! Speriamo anche noi.
oof that sucks; i really wish there was more info on why google decides to crawl or not crawl a page
My guess is that the combination of Wiki and Pokemon is highly suspect for Google.
The Pokemon Industrial Complex has advanced astroturfing especially on YouTube/Twitch, where streamers mention the damn things in any second episode, they "accidentally" meet people going to Pokemon conventions in live streams and so on.
Try to audit the Wiki if anyone abused it.
Can someone start a new Google, please? Just search, nothing more. I'm willing to pay 10 USD a month for that. API access included.
https://kagi.com/pricing
Yeah Kagi already exists luckily, it’s extremely good and worth the money.
Title could be: Apparently Google hates Pokémon Central Wiki now
No, I think "us" is apt, considering this will eventually affect all sites that rely on traffic from Google search, which is basically every text heavy site.
All we can hope for is that people will stop using search (after eventually having enough of the AI wave) for these sort of niche sites and will bookmark and access them directly in future. I don't have much hope.
I spend a lot of time wondering about the true role of search in people's lives in 2026. When I watch people use the Internet, it seems like most of them perform searches simply as fuzzy-matching navigation to the websites they use. Like the way many people use Spotlight to launch desktop apps.
I think this is because
(A) bookmarks lists are inconvenient - scrolling to find a bookmark is slower than typing "youtube" or (cringe) "bank of america" in the URL bar
(B) typing URLs directly requires precision of memory with TLDs being numerous and even things that were once predictable are now mere suggestions (e.g. is your city or town at cityofwhatever.com? city.org? city.gov? Could be anything!)
(C) related to (B) if you screw up a full URL you may well end up at a phishing site that looks like the site you wanted.
I really believe that 90% of Google and Bing searches today are probably for the names (or misspelled or partial names) of the top 100 websites.
If the dominant browsers weren't Google Chrome and Mobile Safari (who gets paid by Google for every search) browsers would build bookmarks for you of your frequently-used sites, and ordered by frequency of visits, present those for direct navigation when you type a word in the search bar, and not send any query to a search engine if you chose one of those. But all incentives point very strongly against doing that and toward sending you to a SERP with 13 ads and an "AI Overview" above the organic results.
Pokemon Central runs ads (Google AdSense at that!), which is probably how they pay for everything.
Google is likely their biggest inbound source of traffic, so they're probably experiencing a marked revenue drop as well.
It's unfortunate that so many livelihoods are subject to the capricious whims of a single company. A company that is increasingly seeking to keep users on their engine without sending eyeballs or revenue to any third parties at all.
We're watching Google's "embrace-extend-extinguish" arc for the web. It's not over by a long shot, but they absolutely intend to finish the job.
It’s why I moved to in-house advertising. It’s a lot of work, but I hope it is the right decision.
Why is it a lot of work? Could you specify some off the more difficult effort? Wouldn’t LLMs help speed this up? This is the one area where I’d think Llms could really take Google down by empowering in house ad platforms.
Depends on how in-house you want to go. If you go full in-house, you'll need sales staff to make deals with advertisers. You'll then need a way of hosting the media provided. You'll need a way to deal with media that does not match what you've requested. You'll need a system to allocate ad space accordingly to contracts with ad clients. It's like a whole new department in your company.
I don’t have a sales staff. I just call a company, tell them why I’m calling and what’s the opportunity, crack some jokes, get serious and make them an offer. It helps that I’m in a niche, thoroughly know the sector and that they most likely already know my websites. As long as I can get to the owner of the company, then I’m golden.
Hi EU. How about one of those lovely anti-trust cases?
Its better off if ads go away. Just use ad blockers.
We would like the wiki to be free of ads, but hosting costs at our scale are real. Since we don’t like ads either, we compromise like this: users can register for free and never see an ad (they are only served to anonymous visitors); they can also use an ad blocker and we won’t bug them about it.
https://xcancel.com/pokemoncentral/status/205712380740463825...
Thank you
This might be useful: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/toxcancel (Redirects to xcancel.com (a mirror of x) when the browser is about to load an x.com page).
Perhaps they're decommissioning search in favor of LLM:s.
This aligns with their Google Zero doctrine, keep all info internal and make the goal for the user to hit 0 external websites.
That's only supposed to happen later this week.
A wiki with only 11 pages?
Perhaps they will investigate why 541,000 pages aren’t being indexed. In my experience, Google provides adequate tools for identifying and resolving indexing issues.
Google won’t serve pages it hasn’t indexed. Seems they left a lot of relevant details out of that tweet.
Edit: and the most likely answer would be that their current robots.txt disallows virtually all indexing. I’m no SEO expert but entries like this seem like footguns:
In the first image you can see how indexed pages go from 40k+ to 11 in the matter of days. Further down the thread I show how 114k+ pages are marked as “crawled but not index” and we can’t understand why. The rest is stuff that is (correctly) blocked by robots.txt.
I thought the image was graphing impressions so fair enough. I still don’t see how this is obviously a Google problem. Webmasters mess up the indexability of their sites all the time. More info needed.
They’ve clearly been messing with their robots.txt so most likely Google is simply respecting that.