Are other wikis having trouble with poor search results? At sryth.wikia.com, if I search for "starlight" the Tunic of Starlight shows up as the 2nd result. If I search for "tunic of starlight" or any variation of thereof, Tunic of Starlight is not in the results at all.
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The numbers there are the numbers the game uses to identify the items. I inherited the structure. (Which existed before autocomplete or the updates to the search engine.) I am toying with the idea of renaming the pages to something more meaningful to humans, but since that's a couple thousand pages I'm a little hesitant, even with some automation...
(edited by Psychoadept)
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Renaming them is a bad idea! Don't! You might want to add pure REDIRECT pages without the "ITEM XXX" prefixes. But leave the existing pages as they are, please!
(edited by Pecoes)
That's what we've done with the most significant/commonly referenced items. And some items have the same name but different numbers, which is part of why the numbers were included in the title in the first place.
(edited by Psychoadept)
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Pecoes wrote: Renaming them is a bad idea! Don't! You might want to add pure REDIRECT pages without the "ITEM XXX" prefixes. But leave the existing pages as they are, please!
You seem quite passionate about that. Why?
(edited by CzechOut)
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Search engines - and by that I mean real search eninges like google, yahoo, bing etc. - hate it when you rename pages. You would most likely see an immediate drop of your page rank.
(edited by Pecoes)
I don't know that page rank is a big issue for us. Our players find the wiki through the game or through the forum. I would be more concerned about breaking links from the forum, though I doubt there are that many that link directly to the Item namespace.
(edited by Psychoadept)
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Pecoes wrote: Search engines - and by that I mean real search eninges like google, yahoo, bing etc. - hate it when you rename pages. You would most likely see an immediate drop of your page rank.
But surely that would only be a temporary drop in rank, wouldn't it? Surely it would return after a few days? And is Google rank really more important than local searchability? I'd trade a working autosuggest function for Google rank any day of the week (providing I wasn't absolutely tanking my Google rank for time immemorial).
(edited by CzechOut)
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I don't think namespaces are the issues with searching for page names and them not coming up. As I've said elsewhere searching for September on Wiki 24 shows 97 results without "september" in their title, then "Christopher September" as the 98th result. It used to work just great a while back, then got rubbish again
(edited by Acer4666)
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I can't speak to the Wiki 24 "September case". But the case outlined by user:Psychoadept is definitely affected by eliminating the main namespace.
(edited by CzechOut)
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CzechOut wrote:
But surely that would only be a temporary drop in rank, wouldn't it? Surely it would return after a few days? And is Google rank really more important than local searchability? I'd trade a working autosuggest function for Google rank any day of the week (providing I wasn't absolutely tanking my Google rank for time immemorial).
But surely that would only be a temporary drop in rank, wouldn't it? Surely it would return after a few days? And is Google rank really more important than local searchability? I'd trade a working autosuggest function for Google rank any day of the week (providing I wasn't absolutely tanking my Google rank for time immemorial).
I don't know any specifics about w:c:tardis: but it's probably safe to assume that what's true for most web sites is true for the tardis as well: The bulk of visitors do not come from the site itself but from the outside and a considerable - maybe the largest portion - come from a search engine. So renaming pages - and thereby destroying the search engine's index - is generally a bad idea. It's possible that the drop in traffic is only temporary and that the crawlers catch up soon, but why bother? That's really not one of those things I'd want to find out the hard way. It's better to err on the side of caution when it comes to search engines!
And I'm really sorry for replying so late. It's been a bit hectic over here :(
(edited by Pecoes)