One of my priorities for the near-term, such as with the main page revamp, is improving Star Wars Fanon's Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To make a long story short, SEO is the process by which your website becomes more visible and listed higher in search engine results. Our page views aren't very good, far lower than they could and should be, so I want to make sure we do what we can to improve our SEO.
Something that can negatively effect SEO are dead-end pages. A dead-end page is a page that doesn't link to anything. If a web crawler happens across the page, that's it. Their scan is finished, because there are no links in the content area for which they can move on to more content. Every content page should have at least one link in it to make our SEO better, because every page should be able to lead into the rest of the site and other interesting topics. That's good for readers too, because it helps point them to more pages they could read.
What I'd like your feedback on is what we should do about our dead-end pages. There are a lot; special pages only let you see 1,000 entries, but I'm betting there are more than just 1,000. Obviously deleting them is out of the question. My thought would be to go through them and try to add relevant links, even if it's just a "See also" section or something to show pages with similar topics. For example, if it's a page about a character, we could have a "See also" section that links to the Individuals category, presented as such:
See also
It could look better, such as being more specific ("More Jedi characters"), but that's basically the best route in my opinion. Do you agree? If not, do you have another idea? I'm interested in hearing your thoughts. - Brandon Rhea(talk) 00:23, February 28, 2013 (UTC)
Discussion[]
Doesn't any page with a category automatically get linked to pages with the same/similar categories in the "Read More" section? Savage1138 23:53, February 28, 2013 (UTC)
- Not in a way that's as beneficial as possible to web crawlers. If they scan the content area then they need to see a link in the content area itself to move forward. - Brandon Rhea(talk) 00:00, March 1, 2013 (UTC)
- There's going to be dozens of dead-end pages no matter what gets done to fanon. Narrative pages, barring the use of something like {{ChapterNav}} are not going to have in-line links. They might have a link to the parent page if they're a subpage, or a category link. I wouldn't expect or want anything different on that front. Atarumaster88
(Talk page) 03:27, March 1, 2013 (UTC)
