Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1398253-20151211022519/@comment-188432-20151212202530

To borrow from a related British franchise: don't panic.

Our search engine results are the same as, and for some searches wholly improved upon, what they were before. Wikia have not, and I speak here fully as a Tardis admin, screwed up our SEO. They've helped us.

I find it helpful when there's a change in life to look at things empirically. So I did a few experiments. In searching on "Susan Foreman", "Fifth Doctor" and "An Unearthly Child", we are currently ranked #1 (discounting Amazon's paid results) on DuckDuckGo (a search engine I'll use for experimental "control" here) for all of them. When we move over to the Google side of the street, we find we're number 1 for Susan Foreman, which represents improvement over this time last week — and we lose to Wikipedia for the other two terms. However, "losing to only Wikipedia" is what we've done for years and years and years — so it's no change.

Let's look, though, at more ordinary nouns. If you Google (or DuckDuckGo) "decapitation Doctor Who" we get lost "beneath the fold". If, however, you look at "sexuality Doctor Who" on either search engine, we're number 1.

Why is this? Well, it goes back to what SEOkitten — a fellow staff member with whom I'm in good contact — says in the announcement thread at Community Central:
 * "Our communities' pages succeed in organic search because of the countless hours editors and admins spend creating unique, engaging content that provides the best possible answer to searchers' queries. Removing extra terms from the title tag will not change that." — SEOkitten

See, decapitation fails a bit on the search term "decapitation Doctor Who", because there's no behind the scenes section where the words "Doctor Who" appear. Sexuality succeeds because it's got a massive BTS section, and because sexuality in DW had its first flower in an episode called "Doctor Who". So between the references to the kiss-friendly TV movie and the BTS exploration of a programme called Doctor Who, it's no wonder we're the #1 article about "Doctor Who sexuality" on the net. (And, btw, kudos to SOTO for seeing this as an important subject for us to explore.)

Now, this doesn't mean that we should run out and create huge BTS sections. Our articles need to be what they are, and not "forced" into some kind of SEO honeypot. SEO spiders are increasingly intelligent and they'll start to penalise us if they see what appears to be unnatural repetition of terms. We just need to have faith that people will search in reasonable ways. "Decapitation Blon", for instance, puts our article right back at the top of the list. Other terms, like "Decaptiation Boom Town" are less successful because that's just three completely ordinary nouns in a row. We have to have faith that the people who are looking for us when it comes to completely ordinary nouns will be able to find more specific terms.

What the search results are telling is here is simple: the algorithmic relationship between "Decapitation" and "Doctor" and "Who" isn't very strong. And it's not. Truth is, what we see more often in DW is the threat of decpitation, which is why googling "Noose Doctor Who" puts us at the top of the pile again.

In any event, SEO is a bit tricky or our favourite intellectual property. "Doctor" and "Who" have always returned ambiguous results, haven't they? We're a bit unlucky in that regard. It's really only been that comparatively recently the terms "Doctor Who India" would return Doctor Who-relevant terms, and that's largely been because of the recent sale of the programme to India. Nowadays, even after this SEO switcheroo, "Doctor Who India" puts our article about India at the top of the Google list. But it used to be that you'd get a result like you still do for "Doctor Who Madagascar" — articles about real life physicians in that island nation well above our article about Madagascar.

Let's face it, we are somewhat cursed with a name which is SEO-ambiguous. Search engines have always struggled a bit with the difference between "The British TV programme, Doctor Who" and "A doctor who happened to be at the accident scene".

That's why, to my mind, it's important to push out the "Tardis" bit to the fore. It's much less ambiguous — as a comparison of search results for "Tardis Madagascar" and "Doctor Who Madagascar" will instantly prove.

And that's precisely why, all those years ago, we switched from doctorwho.wikia.com to tardis.wikia.com. We absolutely are Tardis — not the "Doctor Who wiki". And it, on balance, helps our SEO to say so.