Board Thread:Policies/@comment-31722073-20181113022211/@comment-3361105-20190115073812

Koavf wrote: But choosing the (e.g.) 10 most visited pages is exactly arbitrary. Strategically targeting specific pages based on their viewership in order to increase their viewership is hardly "contingent solely upon an individual's discretion," and far from exactly that.

Koavf wrote: The fact that we can never compete against searches for "Batman" is just as much proof that this SEO naming nonsense is folly You're welcome to run your own website into the ground, using no SEO whatsoever. We have differing priorities.

Koavf wrote: Who is pouring over that many search results to find information about Batman? Probably nobody is 'poring over pages and pages of results for "Batman". Probably nobody is googling just "Batman" in the first place. But in terms of whether or not someone is going to find our pages when they google anything with the word "Batman" in it, a page that doesn't have Batman in its name at all is not going to come up as readily as one that does.

Koavf wrote: Plus, since the #1 result for a bunch of searches is a hugely popular wiki, we can make links from that to here (if our quality is high enough). I'm not following this sentence's meaning.

SeanWheeler wrote: I never heard of Travis Cody. You weren't meant to have. That was my intention.

SeanWheeler wrote: we might have to decide who gets the SEO boost and who wouldn't anymore. For example, Cyborg is now a major Justice Leaguer. Fair point. Not really worth discussing right now, but yeah, maybe we would. So?

SeanWheeler wrote: But whenever people talk about a past continuity, it's the Silver Age Earth-One that gets talked about the most. I expect it depends on how old the fan you're talking with is - but everyone I talk to about comics is talking about the post-crisis comics. I would guess if I were to talk to someone 10-15 years younger than me, and they were a fan, they'd be talking about the New 52 nostalgically.

SeanWheeler wrote: And if the multiverse gets rebooted again, we'd be back where we started. A long time ago, I argued for these things I called "meta pages" that were SEO-enhanced pages, specifically meant to be out-of-universe publication histories for individual characters, while we retained in-universe pages using the standard universe-based naming conventions. Ultimately, it would have been great for our SEO, but it would just have been replicating wikipedia, and causing confusion about the kind of content we have here, and the standards of style between one type of character page and another.

I mention it, because it would have skipped around the fact that our character pages are tied to continuities. In fact, the place our SEO efforts would be best focused is on disambiguation pages - which are not currently ideal, but they're also rather beasts, at the moment, and I would be loathe to see them turn out like Marvel's.

That said, this laser-focus on continuity that encourages you to make these arguments is - as I've been saying - not how readers approach the site. Active editors on this wiki account for less than 1% of daily traffic on this wiki. Approaching wiki presentation and SEO issues from an editor's perspective is foolhardy. Folly even! Follies and frolics!

SeanWheeler wrote: And I don't think it's good for a wiki to name characters based on popularity. I don't think it's good for oatmeal cookies to contain raisins, but some people actually prefer that, and while I think those people are both made of trash and consumers of trash, I do happen to think broccoli is pretty okay. That's a thing that I think.