Thread:Robert Alvarez/@comment-20644-20151214233644

Hi Robert. My name is Brandon, and I'm with the Wikia community team. I'm reaching out to you today to let you know of some news that I am sure you will find disappointing: we have decided to close Crossgen Comics Database Wiki. This community came to our attention when widespread content copying, from DC Database and Marvel Database, was reported to us.

There are two primary reasons why we are closing Crossgen Comics Database Wiki:


 * 1) Lack of proper attribution. We have seen that a lot of the content is not attributed properly. Take a look at this page, for example, and then compare it to this page. The full attribution has not been given, so it appears that the export/import function was not correctly utilized. That means much of the content here is in violation of the Creative Commons license.
 * 2) SEO implications. If you're not familiar with that term, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's all about how well a website ranks in search engine results, like on Google. Duplicated content can be penalized by search engine, and here's how that's resulting in this situation:
 * 3) *If you take a look at your community's page views in the admin dashboard, you can see the results of that; you have 184,000 pages but only have a few hundred page views per day, which is a really poor page count to page view ratio. I think it stands to reason that your SEO is being penalized by duplicating content from other communities.
 * 4) *In addition to hurting this community, the copied content puts Marvel Database, DC Database, and any other communities you have copied from at risk of being penalized by Google.

Although it's possible Wikia's subdomain/URL structure and user-generated nature can provide protection against being penalized, our SEO experts feel that nearly 200,000 pages of copied content poses too great a risk to our established and flourishing communities like Marvel and DC Database. Considering there are only a small handful of users who actually contribute here (not counting the many who have had their articles imported), we will be closing this community no later than this Friday, December 18th in order to eliminate the SEO risks and comply with the Creative Commons requirements.

The reason we are waiting until Friday is so you and anyone else who actually does contribute here can ask any questions of us first. Please feel free to let me know what questions you may have, and I will answer them for you. 