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.)
 * Edit: It was the videos sidebar! I voiced my concerns that the presence of videos would negatively impact editing - because people just watch the videos and never write down what is in the videos.
 * I also asked them to be specific about which data they were tracking, and asked them to track how many people become editors after watching a video. After repeatedly being given generic answers to my requests for specific information, I said "You do not appear to be understanding my questions" and explained the purpose of my questions, then received the incredibly unprofessional response of "I don't think you are understanding my answers.", and was still never told what data they were looking at to consider the videos module a success.
 * Despite being told "we would gladly share our findings with any communities that request it.", I asked for the results three months later and the response was: "What you are asking for are exact specifics and something that would take a lot of work for our team to find out."
 * This is part of the reason why I've stopped giving feedback, suggestions, and bug reports to Wikia. Unfortunately, this potentially-negative pagetitle change means I have to, but at least we can check the outcome for ourselves.

I've just submitted my current keyword search rankings to Special:Contact so that they are on record.
 * Edit: But judging from the confused response to the ticket, apparently the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

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. Some of the results already place the wiki at 2nd and 3rd, so it is possible the results may actually improve.