Thread:Cnoteboat/@comment-1724320-20150319233408/@comment-26858644-20150528014034

Hello, Cook Me Plox!

My name is Angelina and I am the newest member of the SEO team here at Wikia. Charlie was right on with his response, but I wanted to chime in too since these are such interesting questions.

Regarding duplicate content:

Best practice is to rewrite as much of the overlapping content as possible, but I am not concerned about a duplicate content penalty for cases like this. Most sites that are penalized have syndicated content across hundreds of unrelated pages or subdomains in an effort to game search algorithms - definitely not the deal here!

In this case there are good, clear signals in the page titles and meta data that these are related but unique subdomains. Ranking in the first and second spot (instead of the twentieth or thirtieth) also indicates that Google understands the distinction between the two communities.

Regarding ranking position:

Unfortunately, there is no surefire way to ensure one page ranks higher than another. Canonical tags and 301 redirects can point to preferred pages, but these solutions remove competing pages from the index entirely. Not a great solution for this scenario.

''One thing to test is the inclusion of a sentence at the bottom of each close match article on 2007.runescape that says something like: “Looking for the newest version of Runescape? Click here for more."''

Linking out passes a small amount of page authority to the target page and effectively "votes" for the page on the main Runescape wiki. It's not a foolproof system, but it can help to communicate to Google that one result is preferred over another.

And lastly:

Charlie provided some great articles about answer boxes, but I wanted to add that this topic is on our SEO roadmap. Schema markup can be used to get more content into Google answer boxes and other knowledge graphs, but at this point we are unsure about impact on traffic and clickthrough rate. Our team is planning to do some testing around this in the near future.

Cheers! Angelina

p.s. I performed the Ancient Magicks search and am seeing a result from 2007.runescape in the second position. Search results are often personalized, so remember to use a private or incognito tab when checking rankings. It could also be that it just took some time for the index to catch up!