Board Thread:Policies/@comment-31722073-20181113022211/@comment-3361105-20190115051851

Here is what I can tell you:

As Tupka said (but didn't elaborate much on), consistent and logical naming conventions hurt SEO. The reason they hurt SEO is because google (and other search engines) interpret repetitive and similar pagenames (and filenames) as being junk data - i.e. directories of very similar things.

So, a directory of images titled IMG0001, IMG0002, etc is bad for SEO because a) the names of those images give no information about the content of the images, and b) google interprets them as a non-descript set of files not worth indexing.

When it comes to these SEO naming conventions, they apply to the Big 7 JLA members, and a few of their most recognizable villains. As I understand it, Wikia actually asked us to do this for them, so that we would drive viewers to our pages, and improve our pageranks on search engines. I'm assuming that rather than just choosing the Big 7, they actually made a list of top ten or so most visited character pages overall, but I couldn't say for sure.

The explanation for Sean Wheeler's failure to find Batman is nothing to do with how bad our SEO is - it's to do with how good everyone else's SEO is. Batman is one of the world's most popular super-heroes. Saturn Girl is, by comparison, absolutely nobody. Therefore, our pages score very high in pagerankings for obscure characters - regardless of naming conventions because we are the largest, most informative, and most visited source for obscure DC characters - (again, relative obscurity).

The fact that our SEO naming conventions don't do much to get our Batman page to the top of the results should only serve to indicate how much lower in the page rankings it would be without the SEO.

100% promise, if we changed the name of the Imra Ardeen page to "saturn girl (Imra Ardeen)" it would be the number one result, instead of the number two result.

Why don't we do that? Because there are at least four versions of her within mainstream continuity - not to mention multiversal or elseworlds versions. And, for the most part, we don't need a leg-up against competition for characters like Travis Cody - because nobody cares about Travis Cody (but, go figure, our page for him is 8th in google results).

All of which is to say - I'm not opposed to doing a switcheroo between the New Earth and Prime Earth for SEO pagenames. I'm not necessarily opposed to abandoning them all together. But I do want to debunk these speculative suggestions that they weren't actually doing anything, or that they were chosen arbitrarily.

It is the nature of the wikian type (obsessive compulsive organizers) that we want consistent naming conventions, etc. I feel the impulse strongly. But That impulse/compulsion is actually detrimental to the site's success with people who are looking from the outside in.

Side note - whether it is safe, private, or advisable to use, google is the most used search engine in the world, and therefore is the standard by which our SEO must be judged.