Wiki Development for Search Engine Popularity and Traffic

(x11) A lot of more casual or "kiddie" works are low on fandom, so many people don't edit about them. It's not necessarily due to the work's quality.

Many works on this site use their non-English titles. There's a cleanup thread for that but it's slow.

According to Alexa, here's a list of some "keyword opportunities," with my comments:

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It'd be interesting to see if we could put a general hold on page splits, opting instead to trim down very large pages. I know we have a problem with obsessive fans stuffing character pages, like on BoJack Horseman. Another problem, illustrated by BJH, is people randomly deciding to change page names. For example, the page for BoJack Horseman himself has several redirects. The one in use (Characters.Bojack Horseman The Horseman Himself) has 140 inbounds, with Characters.Bojack Horseman The Horse Himself having 1,222 inbounds. Why was the name changed? (By the way, Characters.Bojack Horseman Bojack Horseman has 606 inbounds and the old page split has 688 between all 6 of them.)

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According to similarweb.com, most of our traffic comes from search engines. In addition to that, Alexa says that our bounce rate is at 43.5%, meaning that 43.5% of visitors only look at one page. Maybe we should discuss taking page splits more seriously, where they're only done more or less rarely. I realize we have the "too long page" repair thread, so maybe including some of the people from over there?

Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty

Nice findings there, Water Blap. I'll probably make Sandbox.Alexa for this kind of stuff. Right now, this is what I think:

• Those keywords, along with the previously mentioned "rugrats characters", "all might", and "south park characters" all suggest what we could clean up/expand.
• Buyer keywords also include "star vs the forces of evil" and "mahou shoujo site".
• That "best anime" keyword is "best anime 2018" in full... This is interesting, considering the Season Anime of Year indexes have ended at 2017. Speaking of which, they've also brought us tons of inbounds (Winter 2017 Anime and Spring 2017 Anime both have 8000). Is this the reason we haven't cut them yet, despite the project stagnating? Relevant ATT here and here.
• Excess page split may be quite the menace, but I wonder if this was a solitary instance with Rugrats. Split character pages usually give diminishing results (Characters.Super Smash Bros has 57034 inbounds, Characters.Super Smash Bros Brawl has 13145, Characters.Super Smash Bros Brawl 27 To 31 has 91, though this split was done before Fall Stage I.) Now, I do think that compression is a good idea (like Characters.The Silmarillion should be compressed before being split), but I'm not sure if people will actually have the energy to do that. As for Bojack, we should probably make a thread about character pages for characters who share a name with their work (Characters.Sonic The Hedgehog Sonic The Hedgehog, Characters.Characters.Star Wars Han Solo Character Sheet and Characters.Bo Jack Horseman The Horseman Himself all lead to inconsistency and maybe confusion).
• Our bounce rate has actually went down. It was 45.1% in February 2019 and it is 43.5% so hey, good for us. But our average daily time on site went down. It was 7:36 in February 2019 and it is 6:00 now. Also, the amount of daily pageviews per visitor was 5.79 in February 2019 and it's 4.56 now. To sum it up: out of the frying pan, into the microwave (get it?).
• Confound the fact that Alexa no longer shows the average load time. It was 1.004 s in February 2019, compared to a load time of 2.296 s in October 2018. If we could only know what the load time is now (maybe the video feature and the fact they autoplay at default affected it negatively, can't tell).

Edited by Piterpicher on Feb 16th 2020 at 11:49:14 AM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

One thing we need to keep in mind is that most people probably land on the disambig character page and then look at other pages; inbounds only tell us what page they came to originally, not where they went, so I'm not as concerned about split pages in terms of traffic, because as long as the main page is around to collect the inbounds, people should be able to get wherever they want to go. Now, if people are turned off by being taken to a list of links to the pages they actually want to see, we have no way to know for sure.

Anyway, My Hero is obviously really popular and I want to clean up the pages for it... but I'm so behind on the series, so I can't bring myself to do so until I'm caught up.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Do we have a list of top pages by inbounds, sorted daily? I vaguely remember finding a list like that years ago, and I meant to make sure all the pages on the list were up to standard so that visitors would have a good first impression, but I lost it and now I can't find it.

I'm a My Hero Academia fan, so I could help with whatever cleanup its pages need, but I'm not sure what these issues are. There is no blatant natter, trope misuse, indentation problems, etc. (there used to be, but I've helped get rid of them)

Edited by Zuxtron on Feb 16th 2020 at 6:43:28 AM

You recall correctly; the cleanup thread is here. It was called Inbound Watch.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

The page for Drew Gooden is live. It needs a lot of polishing and I haven't crosswicked it yet since I'm still in the trope-hunting phase, but step one of my plan is done.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 16th 2020 at 10:07:30 AM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

That's a fine start, War Jay 77. Keep going.

Zuxtron: In terms of the MHA pages, I've kinda considered expansion rather than cleanup, as the pages do appear to be well-made. For example, I think that Characters.My Hero Academia All Might page should have 200+ tropes, as "all might" is one of the better keywords and it had about 160 tropes the last time I checked. Do you think that sort of expansion would be possible?

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

Errr, only if All Might actually has 200 tropes to his name. Otherwise this is just asking for 200 shoehorns.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Only 40 or so shoehorns, but yeah, if he doesn't actually have 200+ tropes, we shouldn't have to force it. It's just an idea.

By the way, this page says that we got about 1300000 inbounds this week, though I feel like it said numbers like 2500000 once in a previous year. If it's allowed for unregistered users, maybe I'll check that in web archive.

Edited by Piterpicher on Feb 16th 2020 at 6:31:06 PM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

Is that page linked from anywhere? It's not in the tools. I wonder why an increase on Thursday.

Edit: Whoops, mistook this for the Rugrats thread

Edited by Tabs on Feb 17th 2020 at 12:10:42 PM

This is the continuation of the Rugrats thread. Feel free to work on those pages here if you want to. And yeah, that tool should probably be added to Wiki Tools (never liked the childish name, which is why I made and use a redirect). Which is why I did just that.

I was right. On November 1st 2017 the tool was showing over 2800000 inbounds in one week! The fact that our inbound number halved is more proof of a decline.

Edited by Piterpicher on Feb 17th 2020 at 2:12:51 PM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

By the way, we brought this thread to the attention of the admins and they say that those numbers are not accurate. For one thing, we know that the inbounds counter is not functioning as intended. For another, they have the actual stats and say we're doing fine. Alexa is just an estimation tool and should not be considered precise.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

They actually listened? That is considerate, I'm thankful. For one thing, is it known how the Inbound Links tool is glitched? I assume lower numbers in this context, but maybe not. And by fine, they mean about equal to our performance before July 2019 fine, not "alive" fine? Just asking, because I know Alexa is estimated but I'm not a TVT admin so it's my main source for analytics and I still think this thread could come in handy for ideas and a better wiki.

Edited by Piterpicher on Feb 17th 2020 at 3:46:43 PM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

We may get a post from them at some point soon.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

By the way, I still plan to work on this, despite what the admins' eventual response may be. And I've created the VideoGame.Raid 2020 page (I don't have as much time on Mondays or Tuesdays). I hope others would stay interested in this as well.

Next page on also a game reviewed by him is in the works, VideoGame.Treasure Master.

By the way, Characters.My Hero Academia All Might had an example of Out of Focus added on February 14th, so perhaps what it says will result in us being unable to get 200 legitimate tropes. That's life.

Edited by Piterpicher on Feb 19th 2020 at 10:26:11 AM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

All pages for individual South Park characters except Cartman and Butters have been merged. While the mods have the admins' attention, can you ask them to move the Theater/ namespace icon to Theatre/ (which was requested over 2 years ago), fix transparency for icons and the "no hotlinked images" warning, and add a namespace icon for Shocking Moments?

Keet cleanup

The Danny Gonzalez page is up; again, still hunting tropes, so it'll take a while for the page to thrive, but the sandbox already has some inbounds, as does the Drew Gooden page.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

So, I have been observing this thread for a while, and had no major disagreements until now.

However, I believe that current direction of this thread (the focus on LPers and stuff associated with them) may be too narrow, and could risk Flanderization of the wiki. I want to note that unlike the efforts to clean up the aforementioned anime & WA pages, where we have empirical proof of these works' importance to our traffic, there is no hard evidence proving that YouTubers are our best recourse.

In fact, this line of thought appears to have two underlying premises: 1) only YouTubers generate the key trends in media; 2) the attention YouTubers generate is the one we are best placed to capitalize on. The former is obviously false, while the latter is highly arguable, and may be more reflective of our collective biases. As an example, Water Blap post on the previous page indicates that the music pages are already a significant driver of traffic, in spite of the rather limited attention they receive. I heard suggestions from elsewhere that our coverage of modern rap in particular is rather patchy; there are likely way more such areas of neglect, especially where the non-Anglosphere music is concerned.

Personally, when I had enough free time last year to create VG pages every day, I paid no attention to YT influencers: instead, I took note of whatever was on the front page of Metacritic & that of Steam (the latter in private mode, so that the personalization algorithms do not obscure the underlying trends.) Those who are more inclined towards cinema can do the same exercise for the Metacritic & Rotten Tomatoes front pages; luckily, our film pages are already one of the most up-to-date media (if not the most up-to-date section) on this website. In theory, one could even just regularly buy the books that are located on the bestseller lists (and perhaps even more importantly, those best of the month/year lists), read them and trope them; though I am aware that the chances of finding someone with both the funds and the dedication to do that are limited.

Lastly, never forget that we are not just a trend-follower; we can be a trend-setter, too. Worm became a phenomenon in large part due to us (as its creator had acknowledged in an interview), and Worm had in turn inspired a whole trend of web serials that continues to this day. There are other examples where our involvement can affect works' popularity on its own, regardless of what anyone else does. Simply creating pages for things that you truly believe are quality (or expanding and crosswicking them if they exist but are neglected) can well work on its own, regardless of what anyone else does.

On the flip side, I have a fear that the wiki could be hurt in the long run, including in its search results, if the works that are perceived to be popular (or rather, in the trend, no matter how short-lived it may be) end up plastered over the wiki through crosswicking at the expense of works that are less well-known right now, but have a longer cultural staying power. While this is a subject that likely deserves its own thread, I also retain concerns that the (oft-observed) ideal of crosswicking every work regardless of any additional considerations may end up counterproductive if it ultimately leads to most major tropes becoming "too long" and having huge sections split off, as we have already established that page splits are hugely detrimental as far as getting people to actually read what's written. (Likewise, there is anecdotal evidence that we have been recently isolating "too many" new tropes, and at least some of these concepts would be better served by merging.)

I must stress that we are currently a long way off from the aforementioned scenario becoming a reality, simply because 90%+ of works have barely any wicks, and many tropes are, if anything, short of examples. Nevertheless, I think it's worth preparing for this eventuality: for instance, establishing objective criteria for when a trope page should get the "add only notable examples" brake applied to it.

All in all, this post ended up longer than I initially intended, and probably underscores just how much uncertainty there remains in regards to this subject. Nevertheless, I hope it encourages tropers with additional perspectives on the various media and our relationship with it to speak up.

Edited by NTC3 on Feb 21st 2020 at 9:10:17 AM

That is pretty insightful, NTC3. Here are my thoughts.

I personally think that games reviewed/played by popular people have to bring at least some attention as shown by their inbound counts. (VideoGame.Kang Fu brought 181 inbounds, VisualNovel.Plumbers Dont Wear Ties over 9000, VideoGame.Hong Kong 97 over 16000, etc.) No-one would really want to buy copies and play these games themselves, but seeing others play them or just seeing the games in action may be entertaining for them. This is what led me to believe that making pages on games played by popular YouTubers would result in an influx of popularity and possibly cashing in on the latest trends (like expanding the VideoGame.Plague Inc page because of coronavirus). That said, I want to make pages on more games than just those played by the million-subscriber gamers, like childhood favorites of some (like Swords & Souls and the Steam sequel Swords & Souls: Neverseen, the original had millions of plays and a super high rating on Kongregate yet no page, I have drafts saved up for those), mobile games like Progressbar 95 (I've made a page on that one and expand it regularly, and so far it brought 39 inbounds), games I find interesting and funny but rather overlooked like Custerd's Quest, or those that are on the front page of Gamespot or Metacritic as you've mentioned. This would provide a better variety than just what AVGN played, but I still think Treasure Master should have an article.

You also say that there are holes in terms of non-Anglosphere music coverage. That I can see. We lack an article on Grupa Operacyjna for instance, a Polish rap group who made songs which are satirical and rather biting towards their targets, with their songs being admittedly dated but still having millions of views. There are many several Polish musicians who could have pages like Maryla Rodowicz, Koniec Swiata, Tadeusz Nalepa, and likely several Russian/German/other musicians who definitely should have pages about their music but no-one made them yet. It's possible that it's because it would require people to know a foreign language. You know Russian, I know Polish. Does War Jay 77, the person who is doing pretty good work here, know any languages other than English?

I do believe that we should take advantage of us being possible trend-setters (or at least, gateways to works. I wouldn't have heard of I Dream of Mimi and liked it if it weren't for our pages which I have expanded slightly, or Leisure Suit Larry which I have split as I believe work splits aren't likely to be as muddling for our search results as trope or character splits, so I'm not afraid in the slightest to do so). We'd need to think what could be a possible new trend set by us. I want to split VideoGame.Police Quest someday, but other than that, my mind is a blank.

As for limiting tropes to only "notable" examples, it's an interesting, but likely unimplementable and discouraging idea. TV Tropes has used the There Is No Such Thing as Notability to its advantage with the pages on obscure works which Wikipedia would never have pages on yet are still nostalgic for some (like Epic Battle Fantasy, Sonichu, Flight, etc.), and potentially limiting tropes to only notable examples could lead to difficulties and discourage people from adding examples. How would we decide notable examples for Big Bad, which is our biggest trope (50K wicks and sub-subpages)? That said, several tropes have already noted they may have problems with applying to almost every work in a genre like Grapple Move and say "Please only add notable examples", with their definition of notable. Still, it is admittedly far from a problem as many trope lists still aren't horribly long.

Anyway, I think this thread has led to some progress, with the unreleased work policy possibly becoming more relaxed in a different discussion, or finding that the inbound tool is glitched. This is long too, but still. Thanks for the feedback, I've taken it into consideration as usual.

Edited by Piterpicher on Feb 21st 2020 at 9:30:42 PM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

^ I can barely speak a little French, and that's about it.

As for the focus on YouTubers, you have a good point NTC 3, though all I can really say is that I made the pages for the two YouTubers because I genuinely enjoy their content and think they make tropeworthy stuff, not solely because they may bring inbounds. For me, getting inbounds is a bonus; I just want to add cool stuff to the wiki and since most of my time is spent online, it's mostly internet content I can add.

As for the crosswicking point, that's an ideal of mine that never came to fruition because it's such an exhausting job to actually do, especially when it's for a work you don't know, but for a lot of reasons I still think it's something we should be doing- sure, page splits may happen as a result, but it'll also make the wiki healthier over all. You mentioned needing a thread to discuss it? Such a thread exists. You can see my thought process there.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 21st 2020 at 2:50:24 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Well, for me, the most interesting thing about the Alexa info, is how we're hovering around #750 for the UK... Which seems actually consistent over time... Although, we have dropped about 20 places...

But, we're around #2100 for the US now, and #764 a while ago...

So, what is it about the US? ... Every time I check, I always if there's new sites are more popular than us, that pushed us down...

Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576

Okay, let me be clear in case there is some confusion.

All discrete, creative works may have articles on TV Tropes as long as they have sufficient content to be tropable and are not in violation of our content policy. All it takes is someone to do the work of making the articles. It doesn't matter how popular they are, but they obviously need to be popular enough that someone cares to go to that effort. If only two people know of a work and none of them are tropers, it's probably not getting an article.

However, reviews, Let's Plays, and reaction videos are not inherently tropable, nor are their creators. Just because someone talks to their webcam over game footage doesn't mean we should make a wiki article for them. There must be sufficient creative content to merit an article, otherwise it will always devolve into talking about the person making the videos. Every single time. Seriously.

• "X did a popular LP of Y. We should have an article for Y." This is a coherent, reasonable statement. Go nuts.
• "X did a popular LP of Y. We should have an article for X." This is not a reasonable statement. It needs tropable content, not popularity.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 21st 2020 at 6:41:26 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah, that's why there's tons of popular "Poketubers" who don't have pages here- their content is simply not tropeworthy enough. The issue with YouTubers is that a lot of lines are blurred, but if they make anything that's creative, original, or character-based, that's where the tropes come into play. It's just hard because these things are so popular, it'd be nice if we could make pages for them, but if there's nothing to actually trope except the games they play or the stuff they review, they don't get pages.

Most of what I make articles for are works that are super obscure, so I definitely understand the "people need to actually care about the work" issue as, well, it'd just be nice if more people cared enough about these works to help the pages grow (and also I have to do all the research and stuff myself, which can be really time consuming, so when I make a page on something it's something I really like). It's super rare when someone else adds content to a page I've created, simply because of how obscure the subjects usually are.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 21st 2020 at 3:26:49 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness