UFOPaedia Visibility

[silencer_pl]

I think you should work on some UFOPaedia visiblity. Any google question about XCOM (the Firaxis one) goes to XCOM Wikia, which also I think is more informed than UFOPaedia.

[Pete]

Erm... well that's nothing really to do with me - I'll split this off into a new topic as that's more to do with the structuring of the content I reckon.

 

Of course they have an advantage on the Wikia site as it has XCOM in the title already, which will be giving it a massive boost in search engine results.

[Hobbes]

Double post

[Hobbes]

There's more to it than just the "xcom" in the url, regarding the algorithm that Google uses to rank searches. For instance I have a google alert for XCOM and I've been noticing that while changes to the wikia will almost always appear on the alert, changes to the ufopaedia will hardly appear, unless they're images.

 

There must be something missing about the ufopaedia's individual pages that is preventing them from being detected more by Google's bots regarding XCOM, although I have no idea what.

 

Any google question about XCOM (the Firaxis one) goes to XCOM Wikia, which also I think is more informed than UFOPaedia.

 

About a year ago, I'd agree with you regarding that the Wikia had better information (and graphics) than the UFOPaedia since they got an early start and their platform is more user friendly for edits and images. Nowadays I think that the info in both is about the same, and the Wikia has still more images but that their growth potential and variety of info is less than the UFOPaedia since they're focused only on gameplay issues. The UFOPaedia has a lot of unique stuff that you won't find anywhere else, like the overhead images of all the maps or a list of the Research Codenames and where they are inspired from.

 

Not to mention that when Enemy Within was announced they literally made a copy/paste of the info on the UFOPaedia's page on EW and put it on the Wikia, without giving a source for work.

[Pete]

Thanks for explaining the differences Hobbes

 

I was going to suggest it might have to do with MediaWiki (which is what runs UFOPaedia) running slower than Wikia, but that's not the case - they seem as quick as each other to be honest.

 

Wikia's page source code (rendered HTML, I can't see their programming code ) reveals to me that they have embraced a lot more modern HTML features such as microdata - telling search engines that a page is an article, giving them all sorts of information which help the article appear more in search results.

 

A lot of it will be to do with external links to their site too - I've no way of seeing how many links there are to the Wikia site so there's not much point comparing to UFOPaedia, but I can say that the UFOPaedia site is visited a lot and linked to a lot as well. I suspect that when I finally get the software upgraded we should see some benefits there anyway - I'm hoping to do a bit of testing today and then move it to the new server tomorrow (there will be some downtime from that - I'll be sure to post on the Wiki!).

[Hobbes]

Wikia's page source code (rendered HTML, I can't see their programming code ) reveals to me that they have embraced a lot more modern HTML features such as microdata - telling search engines that a page is an article, giving them all sorts of information which help the article appear more in search results.

 

I'm not a coder myself but I was in charge of an online newspaper during this year and one thing I noticed that is very used nowadays is exactly what you mention regarding microdata to push the site up in search engine results.

 

A lot of it will be to do with external links to their site too - I've no way of seeing how many links there are to the Wikia site so there's not much point comparing to UFOPaedia, but I can say that the UFOPaedia site is visited a lot and linked to a lot as well. I suspect that when I finally get the software upgraded we should see some benefits there anyway - I'm hoping to do a bit of testing today and then move it to the new server tomorrow (there will be some downtime from that - I'll be sure to post on the Wiki!).

 

I'm a very active user on the 2K forums and the UFOPaedia appears regularly linked to there, either by myself or by other users. One thing I was wondering is if it was possible for the admins to see the site statistics - at one point several years ago it was possible as a link on the wiki but now it has been removed.

[Pete]

Certainly - if you can PM me a Gmail email address I can add you to the Google stats package to view the stats.

[Hobbes]

OK, I've just had a look at the stats and there are some revealing indications there. From 2010 to 2012 there was an average of 12-14k unique visitors each month. On January 2012 the number jumped to 35k unique visitors (most likely due to the announcement of the new game) and it remained on an average monthly 20k until October 2012, where it jumped again to a staggering 100k unique visitors, when the game was released.

 

The problem was afterwards. The numbers kept dropping and for most of 2013 there's an average of 7k unique visitors each month, which is worse than the average before EU2012 was released and most likely the missing numbers went mainly to the other wiki.

[Pete]

I think the question therefore is whether they find the other site easier to navigate or easier to get to the EU content? My suggestion is that the small icons at the top-right when you land on UFOPaedia could be clearer. Perhaps when a new game is released it should have a larger, obvious button to click on (possibly box covers) to get to the content?

[Pete]

Hobbes - check it again. I guess the tracking code actually broke a while back as the stats are up to about 2500 visits a day the last couple of days since I fixed the code!

 

It's looking a bit more promising now isn't it? You can change the date range in Analytics to the last two days to see which content is getting viewed most as I suspect that will be more reliable than the last few months' stats looking at this!

 

I even double-checked I've not got the code on the page twice