Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24739709-20151201202536/@comment-26402117-20151212130129

SEOkitten wrote: ''Chiming in here to give a little more context for the change and address some valid concerns in the comments here. ...''

''In all things SEO, it is important consider the purpose of each element to be optimized&mdash;and the purpose of a title is to provide a short description of that document to search engines. Search engines display the first 70 or so characters that appear in the title tag on their results pages and this is the only thing most searchers read before making a snap decision. (Now this is interesting.)

"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."

''Our communities' pages succeed in organic search because of the countless hours editors and admins spend creating unique, engaging content that provides the best possible answer to searchers' queries. Removing extra terms from the title tag will not change that.''

Well, Wookiepedia has fallen from #1 to #7 for "the force awakens" in the past 4 days and the only applicable SEO change was the pagetitle truncation. Seeing as Wikia has been doing community-wide promotion of the film ahead of its premiere in 3 days and its poised to have much cultural and online interest, there are serious consequences for this and Wikia is currently losing a lot of traffic to Wikipedia's page now.

Wookiepedia only has this chance once in every three years (and twelve years for this one) and the movie would have been a huge spotlight. They produced their top-ranking content on this meteoric source of traffic and a good mile ahead of Wikipedia only for Wikia's slight SEO change to take this huge chance away for them. Readers do make instantaneous decisions. "Should I scroll down and find the Wikia page, or click on the well-ranking Wikipedia one?" Well, the traffic statistics do not lie and its pretty clear that there was a failure to address the urgency of this specific case - or emphasise that Wikia is accepting of the subjectual usage case.

The main reason why this is an issue is because the staff chose to rollout on Thursday expecting indexing to recache for Friday and any potential changes in the SEO metric of Wikia to occur in the weekend without the community team available to provide support. Natural keyword placement is still highly beneficial and subjectual - the key in all of this and the explanation of the untold damage Wookiepedia will suffer ahead of the premiere on Tuesday, 15th December 2015.

EDIT: Its back to #2, disaster averted.