Google Jail for new domains, and the google.com/goto links

Two Google changes surfaced within weeks of each other, and both land hardest on sites without an established name.

Google Jail. Weird Gloop, the host behind runescape.wiki and minecraft.wiki, wrote up a pattern it has seen on about 90% of wikis launched on brand new domains since the March 2024 core update: Google shows the main page and nothing else. gta.wiki, hytalewiki.org, hollowknight.wiki and the official Path of Exile 2 wiki all hit it. Inner pages are usually still crawled and appear with a site: search, the main page can even outrank the old Fandom wiki, and the state can last up to a year; the Hollow Knight wiki got out after nine months. What seems to matter is when Google first indexed the domain, not when it was registered. Wikis they launched on subdomains of established domains had inner pages ranking straight away, so their newest wikis start on a subdomain, with a plan to 301 to the proper domain after about six months using the change of address tool. On the cause, the author offers a guess and labels it as one.

google.com/goto. In logged-out and private sessions, organic result links now point to google.com/goto?url= followed by an opaque token instead of the destination. The real address comes back in the Location header of that hop. Unlike the old /url?q= wrapper, nothing in the link decodes to a URL, so every scraper and rank tracker now needs one request back to Google per result.