In late 2021 I created https://bg3.wiki/ as a fan project for the upcoming video game Baldur's Gate 3. There's another wiki for it hosted by a relatively popular for-profit company (Fextralife), and I understand that I'm unlikely to beat them in rankings, but at least my site became visible on the first page of Google results relatively soon for queries such as "baldur's gate 3 wiki" and "bg3 wiki" since there aren't exactly a ton of different wikis for the game.
Apparently, in late October 2022, there was a sudden and extreme drop in rankings for all sorts of queries, and my website now barely appears at all on Google search results. Even when you search for bg3.wiki with the double-quotes to force an exact match, you can't find the site anymore, while you'll see several results talking about it on other websites, like Reddit and various video game forums. (Mostly, my posts announcing the project.) It's still essentially indexed (you can find it with site:bg3.wiki) but ranks terribly poorly and often doesn't show up no matter how many pages of results you go through.
Search engines based on Bing (like DuckDuckGo and Yandex) don't have this issue. My wiki shows up right after the other popular one.
The Google Search Console doesn't display anything of note, except for the terrible performance and gradual drop in indexed page count since then. I've looked everywhere and tried different things, and it gives me pretty much perfect scores on e.g. PageSpeed Insights.
I don't think I've done anything special around October; these are the only possibilities that come to mind:
- There might have been a short period of time when the LetsEncrypt certificate wasn't properly updated after expiration. I don't remember if this was around October, or at another time.
- I have got a second website running on the same VPS: a personal Pleroma instance (Fediverse server, think decentralized Twitter; same thing as Mastodon, just a different implementation). It began choking under pressure at some point due to a flood of activity on the Fediverse network. This prompted me to upgrade the VPS in December 2022, and it's quite possible that this issue had started towards the end of October, however, I checked and made sure that the wiki was unaffected. Pages were still loading fine; it seemed like it was just the Pleroma software & database that were choking, whereas pages served by the MediaWiki installation were loading fine.
From Apache access logs I can verify that Googlebot is still actively crawling my site. Also, some of the forum posts in which I announce the project are merely days old and immediately showed up on Google, so I can't imagine some issue all the way back from October causing this, even if they lasted until the VPS upgrade in December.
Following are some images from Google Search Console showing the dramatic drop for various search queries. The funniest is the third, the performance for "bg3 wiki", because it was consistently performing really well (position 4-5) until it almost entirely disappears.
Does anyone have ideas about what the cause of this might be?
EDIT After my question was marked duplicate...
I've already looked into other questions here that have a similar topic, such as:
How to diagnose a search engine ranking drop?
But none of the suggestions there apply. Neither the accepted answer, nor the other answers that provide a list of possibilities, contain anything that applies to my situation.
There aren't even enough competitors for a "baldur's gate 3 wiki" to fill up the first page of results, let alone second or third pages. After the one popular site I mentioned that hosts a similar wiki, and I guess the Wikipedia article about the game, there are basically no truly relevant results on Google for the keywords "baldur's gate 3 wiki".
So, this isn't about the competition getting better and pushing my site down naturally; Fextralife and Wikipedia taking spots 1 and 2 is fully expected. On top of that, my site pretty much doesn't appear at all anymore for the most obvious search keywords. Not just not on the first page, but also not on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th... There must be some problem with Google and/or my website that causes this; it's clearly not an organic drop in rankings.
