Thread:Fossiliferous/@comment-27234821-20151201035545/@comment-24668482-20151202182054

6. The Name Thing

I get it, you view this from a 'how can I make the copy/pasting of one page to create another as quick and easy and unlikely to contain copying errors as possible'.

So maybe I should just point out that the new visual editor contains a find and replace feature. So you can just use that to find all instances of one collection name on the page and replace it with the new collection name with one click (and only typing new name once).

And I don't think that every single sentence should contain the collection name. And I might be convinced that using 'this collection' and on a page dedicated to one collection does give a get out jail free card on normal writing style rules about naming the object before using pronouns.

But I still think the name should appear once per section, ideally at start of section, so 4 times in total on page in this case.

And that might be personal preference from a style side. But there is also a very serious wiki reason why the pages need to be personalised to the collection in question. Something that, unfortunately, I do have to spend a lot thinking about and taking into consideration when doing things here. And that is SEO.

Using the collection name over 'this collection' is important for SEO for two reasons: 1. it is a keyword (what people will search for), so needs to be on page (within reason of course, not just plastered 100 times for sake of it) and 2. avoiding too much repetition across pages.

Too much repetition between pages is just really bad for the site. And adding 350+ identical pages would be disastrous. The thing is, search engines penalise sites for having too much repeated content. If you just have the same page over and over again to bolster the site's size, or just post the same content over and over again to bolster the site's updates, it will be detected. This is to stop people spamming the search results.

Repetition between the individual collection pages is unavoidable. And I wouldn't advocate that every single page be 100% different from every other page. Consistency and order are certainly important things in writing, and does make everything look better. Having a template that is followed brings structure to the site in general. These are all good things. But, they can't all be the identical in search engine bots eyes either.

There are currently 136 pages on this site. Some already have unavoidable repeated content. To add 350+ almost identical pages on top of that would mean 3/4 of all pages would be almost the same, word for word.

That could potentially undo nearly 2 years of extremely hard work here in terms of growing the site. That growth comes from increasing the site's search engine ranking. If people can't find the site, it cannot grow. When you search for information on this game now, the wiki appears on the first page of results for most common search parameters. That is not an accident, it is the result of a lot of hard work. More work than was probably necessary as I refused to shamelessly advertise elsewhere to increase search engine rankings. We used the longer, harder road of doing it through having the most information about the game instead.