Thread:Cnoteboat/@comment-1724320-20150319233408

Hi Charlie! I had a couple questions about search engine optimization and Bert pointed me in your direction.

We have a rather unique situation at the RuneScape Wiki. Without going into too many details, the developers of the game released a version of the game as it was in 2007, and started adding new things to it. We have a separate wiki for the 2007 version at w:c:2007.runescape. Both are quite popular, each getting around 1 million impressions a day. The problem is that there's a lot of overlap in the content of the two games, to the point that about half of the pages on the main wiki (w:c:runescape) could be copied, with minor modifications, to the 2007 version's wiki. We've determined there's too much different between the games to merge the wikis, so we're planning on copying a lot of the pages over. My concern is with how this will affect appearances on Google. Both wikis generally have the top search result for any relevant query, but there are already some undesirable, inconsistent things happening when both wikis are "competing" for the top spot (hopefully you get the same results page as me):


 * https://www.google.com/search?q=god+wars+dungeon is the ideal situation, with the main wiki first and then the 2007 wiki.
 * https://www.google.com/search?q=monkey+madness shows the 2007 wiki first, then the main version. This isn't terrible, but we'd prefer to have the main one consistently first.
 * https://www.google.com/search?q=ancient+magicks is probably the worst -- the 2007 wiki link is hidden under the "More results from wikia.com" part, only showing the title of the page (Ancient Magicks) and no indication that it's for the 2007 wiki. The pages are quantitatively different (the damage and requirements are different) so the pages aren't interchangeable.

Is there any way with webmaster tools or meta tags to tell Google the preferred ordering of results within the subdomain?

My other concern is whether Google will penalize or ignore one (or both) of the wikis' articles if those articles have nearly identical content (like to the point that most of the paragraphs on a page will be identical), even if both pages are popular. Does them being on the same domain (and even the same subdomain) help or hurt that situation?

More generally, what would you do to maximize Google exposure in this overall situation where both wikis have a lot of overlapping (even identical) content but not enough to justify combining them altogether, in a way that won't harm either one? We want both of them to succeed.

I'm also curious what you think about Google's new answer boxes (like this), and whether they're something worth embracing and optimizing for. Do you know if those get a higher click through rate than normal search results, or do people just get the information they want and stay off the article itself?

Thanks!

Cook Me Plox 