- Don't confuse this with the wiki description used to promote your wiki around Fandom.
The contents of MediaWiki:Description appears in search engine results for the main page of a wiki.
At its most basic, your wiki's description is the contents of MediaWiki:Description. Changing MediaWiki:Description eventually changes your wiki's meta description — a statement in the head tags of your wiki's HTML.
You can see the relationship between MediaWiki:Description and the raw HTML of a page on your wiki by choosing to look at your page's source code. There, you'll see that the contents of MediaWiki:Description appear inside of the <meta name="description"> tag.
What to say
On a Fandom wiki, the default description begins:
- {{SITENAME}} is a database that anyone can edit.
But you should certainly customise it further.
If you're an admin, you can expand MediaWiki:Description, but you should aim to keep your description around 150 characters. Descriptions should include common search terms that casual fans might use when looking for your site on a search engine.
Changes aren't immediate
While admins can change MediaWiki:Description instantly, the meta description won't be so obliging. It can take days (or even months) for changes to MediaWiki:Description to show in search engines. This is because commercial search engines use caching to deliver quick results to you — but that means you're always "looking into the past" when you search the internet. Updates don't occur until a search engine's code tells it when to "crawl" your wiki again, forcing an update to its image of your site.
Unfortunately, that means that the search engine update process is completely outside of Fandom's control.
Utility of descriptions
Once critical to Search Engine Optimization, descriptions have declined in importance due to unsavory tactics like keyword stuffing. The keywords and phrases used in the description are no longer factored into search algorithms, but informative descriptions can drive click through rate. In other words, they can help influence readers to actually click on a search result and come to your wiki.
See also
- Help:Search Engine Optimization - More about optimizing your community for discovery on search engines
- Help:System messages - For editing MediaWiki namespace messages in general.
Further help and feedback
- Browse and search other help pages at Help:Contents
- Check Fandom Community Central for sources of further help and support
- Check Contacting Fandom for how to report any errors or unclear steps in this article