Does it bother anyone else that the Elder Scrolls Wikia often outranks UESP on Google now? When did that happen?

I mean, I know it doesn't affect me really, but I used to be able to google any topic TES related and UESP was the first result. They've been around for a very long time and it just saddens me a bit.

I can't say I care one way or the other. I know which sites I like and I use them.

But, then, I'm probably not the person to comment. I don't care about a lot of things other people seem to care passionately about, such as IMDB rankings, Neilsen Ratings and the Academy Awards.

Perhaps I'm even being a little selfish, because I honestly just would rather have my preferred site to be at the top of the page on Google

Could be because the Wikia has mobile support (which Google encourages) and UESP doesn't (tested with User-Agent Switcher to tell it I'm on an iPhone; actually on a Chromebook). IIRC, Google's planning to stop showing non-mobile-friendly results altogether, so UESP's days (of search results anyway) are numbered.

Note that switching user-agents wouldn't do anything for sites using responsive design principles, but rather the more frowned-upon agent detection methods to redirect to a mobile site load a mobile template (though UESP is not doing responsive design). On your other point: Google only penalizes the non-mobile sites on mobile search results. So if you are on a desktop, it won't change the order of results if a site isn't mobile-friendly.

Rather the most likely reason the wikia rates higher is that it's a sub-domain on the popular wikia.com domain. As such it gains some Search Prestige from the other wikis on wikia.

i think its because the wiki is a .wikia site, and UESP is not


the sad fact is, the better wiki sites for alot of things (Games, shows, novels, etc..), are .wikia sites.. even though in the case of TES the UESP is the better (and usually more accurate) site, average John Doe who just bought Skyrim on a steam sale and is looking for info would not know this, and because they are more familiar with .wikia and not UESP, they click on it when they type "elder scrolls wiki" into google, and since more people choose it for that search entry it comes up closer to the top