TLDR: I changed url structure on my MediaWiki-based site to the structure used by Wikipedia and other wikis, which seems to be the recommended approach. However, site views seem to be down a good amount overall. Rankings MAY have suffered, but I also have more articles actually being picked up by Google now, so that may be why that's happened in the short term. I've heard this is often a problem in the short term but eventually corrects itself. The site was quite small and basically under the radar, so it makes no difference at this stage of the game. How long did this drop in views last for you, if it happened at all?
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Hey everyone. I have a MediaWiki based website and have slowly added content for a while now but I've mostly been neglecting it. However, a couple months ago, I noticed some actual incoming traffic. Not much, but clearly people were finding the site, which is great!
However, one thing I planned on doing for a while before I added anything further, was to change my URL structure from the default (which is pretty sloppy and familiar to those who have used MediaWiki), to the "mywikidotcom/wiki/page_title" that Wikipedia and pretty much any other wiki (including Wikia and Fandom) sites use. It took some research on how to set up the rewrites and all that stuff, but hey, it all seemed to work just fine!
Next up was finding a better way for Google to actually see my pages. Before recently, I had about 80 articles on the wiki. However, the free sitemap makers were refusing to find all of them. All in all, only about 40-50 were actually being indexed. BUT, with all of those, I had some decent performers, so again, I saw some promise!! What I decided to do was put a link on the front page "Linking to all articles" on the site. I then copied the list of articles within the site and manually linked to all of them within a single article. Proper way to do it? I don't know, but now, every single page was being picked up correctly!
It took a while to all come up in Search Console. Right now, I've got about 92 or so articles (excluding redirects). Search Console picked up maybe 50+ the first week, and after almost a month now, everything is showing up. Great! Except, site views are now way down. I was only seeing about a couple dozen daily views, but now it's more like under 10, with a couple higher spikes here and there. Overall rankings seem to have dropped, however since I now have more articles showing up in search console, that kind of makes sense in a way, so I wasn't worried about that. Is this anything to worry about overall? Could it have more to do with something like "Priority" in sitemap? I am thinking of messing with those manually because the auto sitemap generators don't seem to give them proper priority between page types..
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