User blog comment:Craiglpalmer/Wikia is now Fandom powered by Wikia/@comment-8846246-20160926175325/@comment-20644-20160926181254

Wikis are the core of the site, but we have many different ways to contribute and consume content now. The rebrand reflects that.

In regards to search, that's a great point and one I want to address. The change of the brand name, in and of itself, will not have any impact on Search Engine Optimization. It will remain the same, as determined by our awesome SEO analysts. Of course, as brand awareness grows and more readers and editors come to the site to create content, then that will only lead to better SEO. But in the short-term, there's no impact either way.

In regards to the idea that people search " wiki" (like "star trek wiki") and won't search for " fandom..."

We do get a lot of traffic from " wiki," that is definitely true. We also may not see initial, significant traffic from " fandom," at least early on. However, changing the brand from Wikia to Fandom won't impact those search results. The words "powered by Wikia," the wiki names (i.e. " Wiki" being the most common naming convention), and the prevalence of the word wiki across the platform will retain the power of " wiki" search results and search traffic.

On the whole, there are thousands of other on-page signals that say that this is a wiki, so these are big reasons why our SEO team's analysis showed that SEO would not be impacted. Including "powered by Wikia" in the page titles on search results lets us say, as our analyst SEOkitten put it, "Hey, Google! We have a different name but this is still the 10 year old company you know and love. Give us the same rankings across all relevant search terms." Google will do just that by digesting the change.

As a final note on SEO, there are so many factors that go into the strength of our search engine rankings. We've all been loyal to the name Wikia, but I'd encourage you not to confuse user loyalty with general brand awareness or inherent SEO value.

I hope that explanation helps!