User:Quasar/SEO

Not sure why but this month we've had a serious decline in our Google ranking. For greater than 50% of queries, we have declined in rankings; impressions are down 5% overall, and CTR has increased but only by 1%. We have a number of critical core subjects for which we are at risk of falling off the front page entirely. The following is a list of such subjects out of the top 3000 unique queries which we apparently need to pay better attention to in terms of rewriting or addition of new content:


 * Best Doom mods
 * What should we do about that one? The title isn't really encyclopedic, but if it's a frequent search it should probably exist anyway. Possible choices: redirect to list of notable WADs, redirect to Cacowards, create article presenting the Cacowards and similar lists if any other exist (besides the Top 100 WADs of All Time) and whatever review sites still exist. The latter is obviously the better, but how much material do we have for it? --Gez (talk) 10:30, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I gave it a start, feel free to expand if you know of more applicable subjects. I think it serves as a good hub for the various sources and events related to wad and mod curation. --Quasar (talk) 13:06, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Would review sites like Doomed: Doom WAD Reviews, Doom Wad Station, and DooM Nexus fit? --Gez (talk) 13:58, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I'd consider them in scope, yes. --Quasar (talk) 14:18, 23 April 2015 (UTC)


 * BFG
 * Quasar already rewrote BFG 9000. Should we cover other BFG articles as well - the BFG 2704, and Doom 3 BFG? Fraggle (talk) 21:43, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I get the impression that it's the Doom 3 article that's being under-served, in fact. Anything referring to the term would be best touched up IMO. --Quasar (talk) 22:13, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Brian Raffel
 * Rewrote and added more info. --Quasar (talk) 14:19, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Brutal Doom
 * Chainsaw
 * Chex Quest 2
 * Classic Doom for Doom 3
 * Cyberdemon (Doom 3)
 * Article was still virtually verbatim from the fork, and had a number of problems with factual accuracy and encyclopedic tone that I took the opportunity to improve. --Quasar (talk) 22:23, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Deus Vult
 * Reworked intro. Article is still pretty bare. --Quasar (talk) 22:00, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Doom Classic
 * Doom RPG
 * Doom voxel project
 * Rewrote slightly, maybe not enough of a change overall. Subject puts me in a bad mood :P --Quasar (talk) 07:37, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Doom II
 * Rewritten. Fraggle (talk) 22:44, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Per this &mdash; I bet I can fix it up. Give me a week or so.    Ryan W (talk) 20:54, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Doom 2 box art
 * Doom 3: BFG Edition
 * Doom 3 locker codes
 * Created article (judging by comments elsewhere, new players definitely want a handy list!) by forking from PDA and doing some fact-checking. Also rewrote PDA to be something other than a cesspool of copyright infringement; there is no SEO hit for reducing length, because that material was added after the migration .    Ryan W (talk) 02:47, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Doom 3 walkthrough
 * Doom 64 TC
 * Doomsday
 * Hi Quasar. I was going to edit this, but it seems others already have .  It appears some differences are rewording, some are reordering sections, and some are GhostlyDeath's giant template.  Is that sufficient?    Ryan W (talk) 04:22, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
 * DoomRL
 * Doom SNES / Super Nintendo
 * Doom Windows Mobile
 * Doom II soundtrack
 * Unless I'm missing something, this should just be a redirect to Doom II music, so I've done that. Perhaps the others should have the same done to them. --Eris Falling (talk) 12:58, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
 * The only thing missing would be that we need distinct content from the wikia page there as well, or it won't matter how many redirects exist. I did some work on fleshing out the intro just now that'll help. --Quasar (talk) 14:35, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Gerald Brom
 * Expanded with more info from his WP biography that is relevant to his gaming-related career; also added the Heretic box art. --Quasar (talk) 18:07, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
 * GZDoom
 * Hell knight
 * Rewrote. Fraggle (talk) 22:05, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Hell Revealed
 * Hexen music
 * id Tech engine
 * Redirected to Doom engine. The technical detail has increased over the years, though, so I daren't rework it myself.    Ryan W (talk) 19:20, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
 * id Tech 3 source code
 * id Tech 4
 * Macintosh Doom
 * Created redirect to Apple Macintosh. Do redirects matter for SEO? At least it works better in the wiki's own search box, because without the redirect the results for a search on "Macintosh Doom" weren't very helpful. --Gez (talk) 15:14, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Only if Google crawls an actual link to one. I don't include redirects in the generated [//doomwiki.org/w/sitemap.xml sitemap]. Usefulness in the search box is the best criterion for redirect creation though, so I'd say it was a good idea regardless. --Quasar (talk) 15:40, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Maledict
 * Master Levels
 * Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch
 * Rewrote. --Quasar (talk) 15:14, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Mordeth
 * mus 2 midi
 * Pinky Demon
 * Redirected to Demon which is being revised by ConSiGno and Quasar as part of a larger project. Arguably it should redirect to Demon (Doom 3) instead; I rewrote that, as only the infobox had been touched since the fork.    Ryan W (talk) 01:03, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Plutonia
 * Partly done. Didn't realize it was so involved...    Ryan W (talk) 11:19, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
 * PrBoom
 * Real Icon of Sin
 * Sarge (Doom 3 movie character)
 * Created Asher Mahonin (Sarge) --Quasar (talk) 16:23, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Should we put the redirect in too? It's counterintuitive, but searching on the phrase turns up one hit: this subpage.  Searching without quotes, Sarge ranks higher than Asher Mahonin (Sarge).  Is that important?    Ryan W (talk) 03:15, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Strife
 * Stronghold
 * Super Sonic Doom
 * Terminal Doom
 * TNT: Evilution
 * Unidoom
 * Enhanced main article. Some of the other related articles could also be rewritten. --Quasar (talk) 14:37, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Winnowing Hall
 * Zandronum
 * Rewrote and extended as of 20140821 15:24 CDT --Quasar (talk) 20:25, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
 * ZDoom forums
 * Created stub. --Gez (talk) 23:10, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Feel free to edit this page to lay claim to a subject area you want to work on, by adding your sig and an explanation of what articles you intend to target for modification or creation.


 * I would like to state that we have a plugin that shows the first paragraph of all articles as the "description" meta tag. That paragraph is very important and 1) should be the first thing to be rewritten on all articles and 2) should not be too long.
 * But again the biggest problem we have is that Google detects that all we have is "copied" content (since it was in Wikia first after all) and is penalising us: some results are not even appearing. --Kyano (talk) 19:26, 21 August 2014 (UTC)


 * How popular are these articles? (how many clicks do we normally get from them?) Some of them seem slightly obscure and if they're not that popular then maybe we shouldn't be wasting time on them - if we're dedicating effort to rewriting articles then it ought to be on ones that are going to be worth having the boost. Fraggle (talk) 21:43, 21 August 2014 (UTC)


 * It varies. Some do not have a lot of searches, others have many. I am thinking of this from a weakest link perspective... I won't discourage efforts spent on any articles, especially ones that you feel are more important, but the plain fact of the matter is that I already addressed most of those earlier and they have fairly good ranking as a result. Otherwise you'd see them listed here. If we want to show up for more queries, we need diversity of content. --Quasar (talk) 22:00, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

More on redirects
Per threads above, 2 possibly stupid questions: Ryan W (talk) 01:26, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Should we move existing articles over redirects with higher query volumes when possible? E.g. Doom II &rarr; Doom 2, Zombieman &rarr; Trooper, Marijo Sedlić (Sedlo) &rarr; Sedlo.
 * If a title redirects to an article with a higher query volume, is it sufficient that the target gets rewritten? If so, how many such redirects are in this list?


 * There is no value and it is more likely to hurt than help. If most external sites link to Doom II and we move it to Doom 2, Google will be confused. I do not recommend any change with respect to redirects. I make the search engines understand what page they really are by making sure that redirect articles use the rel=canonical pointing to the main article. --Quasar (talk) 19:09, 13 April 2015 (UTC)