Congrats DoomWiki

[Fonze]

A step in the right direction...

[Linguica]

But who uses Bing??

[Spectre01]

Bing master race reporting in!

[RightField]

Is the Doomwiki optimized for Google SEO?

These days that's the easiest way to get the search results on top.

Some tips: http://www.wix.com/blog/2016/01/5-easy-seo-tips-to-boost-your-site-in-under-an-hour/

(there are more specific ones as well, but I don't remember right now)

[BigDickBzzrak]

DuckDuckGo shows the right wiki as the first result too. But not Google...

[Jon]

RightField said:

Is the Doomwiki optimized for Google SEO?

These days that's the easiest way to get the search results on top.

Some tips: http://www.wix.com/blog/2016/01/5-easy-seo-tips-to-boost-your-site-in-under-an-hour/

(there are more specific ones as well, but I don't remember right now)

Yes I believe Quasar has spent a lot of time on this and knows most of the tricks.

IMHO (but I'm not an expert) the best thing to do is write good articles. Change existing ones to be more detailed and have different text to the fork-base, and write new ones that it lacks.

Moving to HTTPS might help too (and we're planning that , slowly)

[nxGangrel]

Linguica said:

But who uses Bing??

For those who want safe search off... ;)

[Saturn]

nxGangrel said:

For those who want safe search off... ;)

Best porno search I've ever used

[scifista42]

Is it true that if you keep Googling doomwiki, and then visiting only doomwiki and not wikia, and not clearing your Google cookies, then doomwiki will become more likely to show up before wikia in the results for you?

[Maes]

I thought that SEO was just a fancy term for "pay Google up and see your webpage come on top" ;-)

[finnw]

scifista42 said:

Is it true that if you keep Googling doomwiki, and then visiting only doomwiki and not wikia, and not clearing your Google cookies, then doomwiki will become more likely to show up before wikia in the results for you?

It depends.

When you click on a search result, google tracks whether you stay there or hit "back" to return to the search results. If the latter, it assumes the first click was not the one you wanted.

So what you definitely do not want to do is:

• Search for your keywords (without including any "site:" directives)
  
• See a Wikia link at the top. Click it.
  
• Decide you would rather see a similar page on doomwiki.org. Edit the URL in your address bar to change the site.
  

The problem with that is, Google can no longer see the tab. All it knows is that you clicked a Wikia link and did not return to the search results, so score +1 for Wikia.

Instead, if Wikia is on page 1 and doomwiki is not, edit the search field and add "site:doomwiki.org"

Disclaimer: I heard about this in a stackoverflow podcast about 5 years ago. It may not be accurate or up-to-date.

[RightField]

Maes said:

I thought that SEO was just a fancy term for "pay Google up and see your webpage come on top" ;-)

Not exactly, Google utilizes certain tricks to define which page has the most relevance to the search entry. By knowing this, you can design the web page to score higher than others that do not make use of them.

For instance:

1. Title: That the title is the correct length and contains the search phrases
2. Description: The description is the correct length and contains the search phrase
3. H1 Heading tag: That the site contains a h1 tag containing the search phrase
4. Images: That the site contains images with the search phrase as image text.

I'm sure you can also just pay Google. ;)

[snapshot]

Linguica said:

But who uses Bing??

400 million, There's your answer .

[Dragonfly]

scifista42 said:

Is it true that if you keep Googling doomwiki, and then visiting only doomwiki and not wikia, and not clearing your Google cookies, then doomwiki will become more likely to show up before wikia in the results for you?

100%. Google is constantly catering the results to the user, and is a thing I constantly have to explain to clients. For more 'legit' results, use a private browser window such as Chrome's Incognito Mode.

----

Regarding bing users, 399,000,000 / 400,000,000 are old farts who barely know what a computer is and are victim to the default browser & browser settings that Windows comes with. Don't be an old lady, use Google. ;)

[WadArchive]

scifista42 said:

Is it true that if you keep Googling doomwiki, and then visiting only doomwiki and not wikia, and not clearing your Google cookies, then doomwiki will become more likely to show up before wikia in the results for you?

Known as a filter bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

Something duckduckgo doesn't do.

Creating description, h1 and title tags do help to an extent but it is the content on the page itself that makes the most difference.

then of course google changes its mind and decides to give other factors more weight without warning....

[snapshot]

Dragonfly said:

Regarding bing users, 399,000,000 / 400,000,000 are old farts who barely know what a computer is and are victim to the default browser & browser settings that Windows comes with. Don't be an old lady, use Google. ;)

Regardless, It still counts, Doomworld is filled with old farts after all .

[Graf Zahl]

WadArchive said:

then of course google changes its mind and decides to give other factors more weight without warning....

I said it before and I'll say it again: The persistence with which Google prioritizes Wikia suggests that some serious money is at play here. This is precisely the stuff which already caused several EU investigations.

[Quasar]

Graf Zahl said:

I said it before and I'll say it again: The persistence with which Google prioritizes Wikia suggests that some serious money is at play here. This is precisely the stuff which already caused several EU investigations.

Well every visit to wikia is money to Google AdSense after all. You can find their serving URLs all throughout the other mess of thousands of domains accessed if you go there w/o an effective adblocker active.

The fact DoomWiki often outranks wikia everywhere BUT on Google is making this pretty obvious at this point IMHO, too. I know what they say and I think they are not doing what they say, too.

[Fonze]

Google does many shady things, messing with search results is only the entrance to the rabbit hole.

[LexiMax]

scifista42 said:

Is it true that if you keep Googling doomwiki, and then visiting only doomwiki and not wikia, and not clearing your Google cookies, then doomwiki will become more likely to show up before wikia in the results for you?

I have not found this to be the case. Sometimes I get both, but wikia is usually on top. Sometimes I only get the wikia article. I usually have to prefix my searches with "doomwiki" to get it to pop up. It's really befuddling. I don't subscribe to Quasar's "they're prioritizing wikia because they run adwords" nonsense, since the Nethack Wiki underwent the same ordeal and came out with much better search engine ranking, but given how many sites in the doom community promote doomwiki I'm surprised how often doomwiki is not on the first page of results.

The only explanation I can see is that Google has somehow tagged Doomwiki as a spam site since it is newer than the wikia and still shares a considerable amount of content. I believe Google did this with good intentions, since I believe it was done to combat sites that copy-pasted Stack Overflow content, but in the case of Doom Wiki it kinda backfired.

I am of the opinion that the way you fix this is to significantly rewrite pages that are still similar between the two, so Google doesn't flag it as spam anymore. I presume that the pages on DoomWiki are under a license incompatible with wikia, which means that nobody is allowed to copy stuff from DoomWiki back to wikia, but if not, that would help too.

[Graf Zahl]

If that is true, maybe someone should actually try to contact Google...
It's clear that something in the system is intentionally prioritizing the Wikia site.

[Quasar]

AlexMax said:

I have not found this to be the case. Sometimes I get both, but wikia is usually on top. Sometimes I only get the wikia article. I usually have to prefix my searches with "doomwiki" to get it to pop up. It's really befuddling. I don't subscribe to Quasar's "they're prioritizing wikia because they run adwords" nonsense, since the Nethack Wiki underwent the same ordeal and came out with much better search engine ranking, but given how many sites in the doom community promote doomwiki I'm surprised how often doomwiki is not on the first page of results.

The only explanation I can see is that Google has somehow tagged Doomwiki as a spam site since it is newer than the wikia and still shares a considerable amount of content. I believe Google did this with good intentions, since I believe it was done to combat sites that copy-pasted Stack Overflow content, but in the case of Doom Wiki it kinda backfired.

I am of the opinion that the way you fix this is to significantly rewrite pages that are still similar between the two, so Google doesn't flag it as spam anymore. I presume that the pages on DoomWiki are under a license incompatible with wikia, which means that nobody is allowed to copy stuff from DoomWiki back to wikia, but if not, that would help too.

You're probably correct, but, we've been in the process of that rewriting stuff for the last 5 years. There's over 4000 articles on the wiki now and the bulk of them are one-paragraph stubs about megawad maps. Nobody even wants to edit them. In some cases they probably shouldn't have even existed to tell the truth, since they will never be expanded or properly maintained.

[Jon]

Quasar said:

You're probably correct, but, we've been in the process of that rewriting stuff for the last 5 years. There's over 4000 articles on the wiki now and the bulk of them are one-paragraph stubs about megawad maps. Nobody even wants to edit them. In some cases they probably shouldn't have even existed to tell the truth, since they will never be expanded or properly maintained.

I think for some of those - such as ones that pull in the map template and then don't actually make any further changes, we are better of actually deleting the article. That sounds drastic even as I type it, but it's pretty much content free anyway, and hurting the wider project.

[Quasar]

Jon said:

I think for some of those - such as ones that pull in the map template and then don't actually make any further changes, we are better of actually deleting the article. That sounds drastic even as I type it, but it's pretty much content free anyway, and hurting the wider project.

I'd rather not but it would certainly help if people stopped creating new ones for every release, except where they're willing to actually do the work to get the map images, write a basic walkthrough, tabulate the thing types and map size specs, and research any relevant trivia or development information.

The typical process right now is "oh a new megawad I like or was personally involved with is out, time to create 32+ stub articles and then never look at them again!" I think we need to make this sort of "contribution" less welcome moving forward.

[LexiMax]

Graf Zahl said:

If that is true, maybe someone should actually try to contact Google...
It's clear that something in the system is intentionally prioritizing the Wikia site.

I would be incredibly surprised if Google bothered to respond beyond pointing to their existing articles on the subject such as their Webmaster Guidelines and Steps to a Google-friendly site.

Google does not want pages gaming their ranking - even if it's for a noble cause, and any information about why a page is not ranked as highly as it ought to be might be useful information to a spammer as well.

[Batelli_1605]

nxGangrel said:

For those who want safe search off... ;)

CTRL + Shift + N

Linguica said:

But who uses Bing??

Lol it's like Baidu, when you install anything on your PC: "Do you wish to add baidu to your Computer? 'Click No' " Baidu has been successfully installed.

[HorrorMovieRei]

Jon said:

IMHO (but I'm not an expert) the best thing to do is write good articles. Change existing ones to be more detailed and have different text to the fork-base, and write new ones that it lacks.

In general, Doomwiki's articles are already better, but recently I noticed that the articles pertaining to the new Doom game are lackluster when compared to the Wikia's. There isn't even a page for the Possessed soldier and guard. Is something going to be done about that?
I'd do it myself, but I don't know how to edit the Wiki, and I don't actually own the new game, so I'm not exactly qualified to write articles about it.

[Quasar]

HorrorMovieGuy said:

In general, Doomwiki's articles are already better, but recently I noticed that the articles pertaining to the new Doom game are lackluster when compared to the Wikia's. There isn't even a page for the Possessed soldier and guard. Is something going to be done about that?
I'd do it myself, but I don't know how to edit the Wiki, and I don't actually own the new game, so I'm not exactly qualified to write articles about it.

I worked my arse off trying to single-handedly document the game that I haven't even gotten to personally play yet, due to my PC being insufficient and my indecisiveness about what to do on getting a new one, so yeah there are omissions and some missing important articles still. Most of our Old Guard members don't give a flyin' fuck about the new game TBH, so it was mostly on me. Contributions are welcome. We're falling further behind too as I just don't currently have time to document the new updates and DLC stuff that is coming out.

[nxGangrel]

Batelli_1605 said:

CTRL + Shift + N

I'd still use both.

[Addemup]

DMGUYDZ64 said:

Regardless, It still counts, Doomworld is filled with old farts after all .

Hey, I'm really young compared to the rest of you (13) - and I'm a new user.