Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26321732-20160216183027/@comment-26321732-20160217141806

@Nerfmaster8 I should have been more clear! The best search position is 1, so the lower the number the better the result. Removing those additional keywords removed less relevant terms and gave each page a clear, concise title that better reflects the content on the rest of the page. Gaining .5-1 positions in 2 months is a great success (SEO is notoriously slow and gains tend to be incremental).

Ducksoup isn't on the SEO team full-time (he has a lot of other responsibilities!), so he wouldn't have had examples. I apologize for the confusion and accept full responsibility for the lapse in communication.

@Ciencia Al Poder changes like these are rolled out in small increments at first to be sure the code works properly before making sitewide changes. That is what you spotted in November - good eye! The sitewide rollout (minus special pages and some others that are less accessible to search crawlers) happened in December.

@DEmersonJMFM Traffic on Munkapedia definitely increased as a result of the movie release, but that does not have an impact on rankings. In fact, the press and competition around a movie release can drive down rankings as others enter the competition for those search terms.

Munkapedia's success in December had very little to do with titles. It is a testament to the hard work of its admins and contributors: Munkapedia pages offered the best possible content for those queries at the time search users needed it.

To the point about historical data: Google provides a 90-day rolling average in Search Console but our team does not have access to rankings past that timeframe. For now! Our team is compiling and storing this data so we can see trends over a longer of period of time and for more communities. This is data we hope to share with users in the Insights dashboard in the future.

In assessing on-page changes like this one, it is important not to go too far back unless it is to check month-over-month or year-over-year trends. Our site is massive and both contributors and engineers make countless changes each day; looking too much further back muddies the waters and makes it harder to measure the impact of that particular change vs. the impact of those other changes.