Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24739709-20151201202536/@comment-13301-20151212122750

SEOkitten wrote: "Avoid repeated or boilerplate titles. It’s important to have distinct, descriptive titles for each page on your site. [ . . . ] Long titles that vary by only a single piece of information ("boilerplate" titles) are also bad; for example, a standardized title like " - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts" contains a lot of uninformative text."

Doesn't the suffix - Wikia fall into boilerplate titles and be repetitive, given that "wikia" is already present in the URL?

SEOkitten wrote: "Brand your titles, but concisely. The title of your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site—for instance, "ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle." But displaying that text in the title of every single page on your site hurts readability and will look particularly repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query" (emphasis mine).

Changes like this can seem sudden, but clean and concise titles are a tried and true SEO best practice. I am confident that removing confusing signals from the title gives each page the best possible chance to rank as high as possible for relevant search terms.

Same as my point above. - Wikia adds nothing of value to the page title, but it gives 8 extra and unnecessary characters to the page title, that could be used to give a valuable description of the wiki, like "Wookiepedia - The Star Wars wiki".

Note also that the title of the page is at the start of the page title, so if the brand name exceeds the 70 character limit given by google, the important part (the title of the page) is still visible.

Please, refrain from making those disruptive changes that harms the 99% of wikis that either have the MediaWiki:Pagetitle untouched or customized with a small and concise title that add valuable information of the wiki contents, just to optimize for the 1% of wikis that changed it following your old guidelines of adding random keywords on page titles. That was your fault, and you should take the responsibility of either fix those wikis manually, or better, teach them about the new SEO practices and ask them to do the change, instead of putting all of us into the same bag and forcing a change that does more harm than benefit.