Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24739709-20151201202536/@comment-452-20151204164554

Personally, I see this as yet another way Wikia is taking away our freedom to customise. It's easy to use something as nebulous as "SEO" as the justification for introducing restrictions, as there's not much that can be said to oppose it.

For anyone wondering if this will effect their search rankings: the best way to find out is to test it yourself. Conduct searches today which include your keywords, and note down your results, then perform the same searches in a month. The more people who test this, the more results we will have to show Wikia if it does turn out to hurt search results. I know from things they've said in the past that they do not look at specific figures, but only aggregate data. When I've asked them to be specific about the outcome of changes in the past, they've outright told me that they were not keeping track. (Unfortunately, I can't quite recall which particular change that discussion was about, so I can't look up specifics. All I do remember is that I had to repeat the question several times to get a straight answer... which doesn't narrow it down, because evading direct questions is pretty standard.)

I've just submitted my current keyword search rankings to Special:Contact so that they are on record. Some of the results already place the wiki at 2nd and 3rd, so it is possible the results may actually improve.

4 of the 6 of my pagetitle keywords were chosen due to the fact that they were not common words used in articles, I anticipate that the rankings based on those will change.