Board Thread:Policies/@comment-1038387-20190409180105

Starting a new discussion because the old one has well over a hundred replies already and new info can get lost.

I thought about asking some general SEO questions to staff, which resulted in me having an hour long Slack call with FishTank about SEO and UX and stuff. Some major points from that call, which I suggest we'd implement, are

(and these are ones we can feasibly implement and are darlings I have no issue with killing)

Concerning :
 * SEO pages names work.
 * They should point to the present version. Yep, Prime Earth. He actually suggested making the short version the main page - so Batman - but yeah, no thanks.
 * The most common name should be used as a pagename. Like the moves of Barry and Bart Allen, so too should we do with the currently very, very hot "William Batson". Not only does this improve UX, having links called "Billy" link to a page called "William" can lead to being punished on Google. Google does see Billy as a variant of William and adjusts its results based on it, but that's not as clear among users blogally.
 * Speaking of William Batson, move it to Shazam (Billy Batson).
 * Our page templates suck because they put the ToC above the lead and the quote isn't much of an intro. Starting a page with a quote is bad for search engines. Unfortunately, there's no simple way of ditching the page templates - a relic from early days, when it seemed the only way to standardize things. Page templates is a whole other can of worms I'm quite willing to pull open another day.
 * Notices: general rule of thumb: notices for readers at the top, notices for editors at the bottom. Images, quotes and the DC logo in them are needless distractions.
 * Main under sections is a good thing to have, as long as it's clearly graphically offset from the rest of the section.
 * Our massive powers templates - Kryptonian, Firestorm, Amazon, Martian etc... are not helpful. For good SEO, about 80% of a page has to be unique and on smaller pages, like one issue Kryptonians, that wall of text makes it a trash page, which hurts overall site scores. A better way to do it would be just say they have standard powers and link that to Kryptonians#Powers.
 * Speaking of unique content, NavBoxes on character pages are another no-no.
 * The AIQG links are useful, but that would be something we could also have in the infobox. The numbers aren't really necessary, and they're broken anyway on pages with '.
 * Like it or not, galleries in the infobox with every alias and the civilian ID are better.
 * Because of Fandom's Dynamic Categories, categories are indexed better - previous design counted them as duplicate pages and ignored them. As a consequence... we should really cut down on them, because some are duplicates. Whether I'd want to ditch hair and eye color I'm not sure, but there's no real need to sort characters by weight and height. Height perhaps, but by feet increments only.
 * Generally, search engines can't (yet?) identify significance of certain words in pagenames, unless they're divided. "New Earth/Characters" is better than "New Earth Characters". "Captain Marvel/Titles" is better than "Captain Marvel Titles". Locations, Villains, Supporting Cast, et cetera.
 * Concerning locations: since it might not be feasible to build in an autocat override, we might want to remove all higher level entries. So we'd just fill out State and maybe Country for Gotham City, not Galaxy and Star System.
 * Galleries are better off with captions. If the caption is "Batman on a rooftop, #85", it shouldn't be in a gallery.
 * These could do with UX improving content, as the improved SEO of categories drives them to the foreground. It might be possible to whip up a template which fetches the main version and image from the disambig and have links to /Supporting Cast, /Villains, /Titles and some more, suggestions are welcome.

And concerning our not-actually-Disambigs - mostly another can of worms but included for the heck of it.
 * They're not actually disambigs, and labeling them as such might hurt SEO, as Disambigs are noindex in more recent versions of MediaWiki (Fandom isn't planning on staying forked 1.19 forever). And the current template is not portable. A few months ago, I was doing some regular RC patrolling on my cell phone at work, and I was appalled by Carmine Falcone. The main image was the Deathstroke one. The top section isn't portable, so it doesn't show.
 * The two image solution was to deal with the New 52, but is both technically and UX-wise suboptimal. And be honest, like the SEO names, we're so deep into Prime that they should get top spot.
 * If we get one top spot, it should be on the right. It can be a short portable infobox.
 * In our discussion, we used Shazam as an example (have I mentioned he's hot at the moment?). It's really a bad example, as it's two disambigs rolled into one. However, other than the large chunk of text, it doesn't explain the significance of who or what this "Jebediah of Canaan" and "Mamaragan" are. The top section of previous mainstreams and other bearers could do with a better explanation. (also, get rid of the effing robot).
 * AIQG links are quite useful as a shortcut to us editors, but only add confusion to readers. Consider letting them go.
 * What "Elseworlds", "Other Media" etc. could do with brief general explanations.
 * Contentious point I'm not sure about: splitting off long galleries. List maybe the 8-10 most prominent versions, shunt the rest of Batman's 1-issue imaginary story versions into a sub page.

Some of these issues aren't really a community discussion/vote/whatever thing but more of a thing for just the admins (especially the / issue). We all love Jamie, but we're dealing with relics of 2006 Jamie with 2006 software solutions, 2006 internet users and 2006 internet. 