Wikivoyage talk:Search Expedition

Links from Wikipedia in other languages

Swept in from the pub

meta:Talk:Interwiki map#Wikitravel needs to be nominated for removal again, but before that can happen the wikitravel: interwiki link (and associated templates) need to be replaced with their WV equivalents and the old templates nominated for deletion. This process has already been completed on en: fr: simple: but there is a long list of small Wikipedias in other languages where links to WT still need to be removed or replaced.

What would be the best way to get the word out to editors which actually speak these languages? K7L (talk) 12:40, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Templates: bjn bn id jv jv map-bms mk mr ms ms or or pam pt ru ru sa sa sh si sk sl sr su ta te th tr uk vi yo xmf

Interwiki links: commons de en-source en fa fr ja ko en-mw meta pam pl pt ro ru-source ru tr zh-books xmf

Interwiki links done: af ar ast as az bar bat be be-x-old bg bjn bn bo br bs ca cbk-zam ceb cs cy-books da diq dv el en-books eo-books eo es fa-source fi fy gd gl gu haw hif hi hr ht hu ia id-books id ig ilo io is it-quote it ja-dict jv ka km kn ko-source kw lad lo lt map-bms mr mdf mi mk ml ml-dict mn ms mt nah nds-nl ne new nl nn no or pl-news pt-news pt-dict qu sa sco sd se sh simple si sk sl sm species sq sr su sv ta te test th tl to tpi tr-books tt uk ur vi vi-dict war wa wuu xh yi-dict yo zh zh-yue

One question I have is this: some of the above (especially the English non-Wikipedia ones) are in userspace. Do we want to go around changing people's userpages? On many projects that's highly discouraged. --Rschen7754 02:50, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Only in the article space. One can limit their search to that. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:48, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

I'll take a look at the above. I spent last week creating accounts on every WMF wiki, and I'm autoconfirmed on a lot of them. --Rschen7754 09:17, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

By the way, I've struck the Test Wikipedia from the second list as that's all non-mainspace links. If I find others like that I'll strike them too - hope you don't mind. --Rschen7754 09:19, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

However, removing the wikitravel: prefix entirely will break these users' pages - do we need to use a hardlink instead? --Rschen7754 09:57, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

An external link to WT is preferable to an interwiki link for a couple of reasons: 1) a proper external link gets rel="nofollow" which tells search engines to ignore it and 2) the interwiki prefix needs to go away before a request can be made on meta: to finally remove it from the interwiki table. I'm not sure if meta: looks at userspace when deciding whether a prefix is in use or can be deleted. K7L (talk) 00:13, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Google Search Results

Swept in from the pub

Hi! I was just wondering if there's any way we could improve Wikivoyage's standing in Google page rankings. At present, if I search for 'travel guide', 'free travel guide', 'wiki travel guide', 'london travel guide' and 'new york travel guide'. The site didn't appear on the first page for any of these queries nor on the second, despite the fact that another Wiki-based travel site does appear in these places. Is there any way we could improve our exposure? --Nicholasjf21 (talk) 16:42, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

I guess the best way to increase a site’s exposure is by implementing SEO methods. Even Google has a number of tools that can help. Adwords will also increase traffic to this site. --Saqib (talk) 18:04, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Most likely we're incurring a duplicate content penalty as a long list of articles written by users now here are still sitting on another Wiki-based travel site. That issue will go away once inbound links which were pointing at the other site are updated to point here. Links from Wikipedia are still being fixed in many obscure languages, see #Links from Wikipedia in other languages, #Putting a Wikitravel: namespace in the search box actually takes you to WT and #Sister project link templates above. One particularly annoying link to the other site was in the disclaimer at the bottom of imported pages on this wiki, bugzilla:41983. The new MediaWiki version (1.21wmf9) which fixed this bug and one other (bugzilla:43220, the ability to change the {{listing}} format) was deployed today - which should slowly but surely make a big difference to search engines mistaking an abandoned, ad-infested copy of this content on another Wiki-based travel site as somehow being the "main version".

We should be doing more to verify that (usable, guide, star) articles here which link to Wikipedia have a {{wikivoyage}} sibling project box linking back to us from the /* External links */ section. WP is the sixth-largest site on the Internet and not to be underestimated; if our content is relevant and useful to Wikipedians for a particular destination, we should say so. Certainly any templates on en.Wikipedia which used to point to another Wiki-based travel site now point to us (about three thousand were cleaned up using a robot script on WP) but other languages still have many outdated links which need to be changed to "Wikivoyage". Let's get our own house in order across WMF projects before sinking money (from where?) into AdWords-style programmes. K7L (talk) 20:53, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

If we make this site substantially better this will attract readers, press and Google. But yes currently our Google rating is bad. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:26, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Could we get a bot running to sync interwiki links between WV and WP articles. Our articles already have the WP links, so it would be easy to find the appropriate WP articles to stick links into. I was pretty shocked the other day [1] to realize there was no interwiki link to our Chicago guide! --Peter ^Talk 21:57, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

For that matter, could WP get {{sister project links}} fixed so that it actually links directly to the intended destination page if given a parameter (like every individual template for siblings) instead of launching a pointless Special:Search enquiry? It's not a huge issue as most links are using {{wikivoyage-inline}}, but if wp.fr can create a viable {{autres projets}} which isn't kludgeware, why can't en:? K7L (talk) 22:47, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

I understand it will take time to build up the links direct to us to increase our google rank. However, in the interim, we could try to play and build up the word voyage. If I search Japan Travel Guide, we aren't in the running. However, Japan Voyage Guide, has us as a first hit, and Japan Voyage has us on the first page. We could update Travel guides at Wikivoyage to Voyage guides at Wikivoyage. In our PR, we could then mention Just google voyage. --Inas (talk) 22:56, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

I think the way Wikipedia has handled us in w:Template:Sister project links is unfair. Only 3 sister sites are automatically omitted unless manually added: Wikidata, Wikispecies and us. Wikidata is omitted because an automatic link would never work; the item number must be entered manually (I also believe that Wikipedia is not sure whether it wants to link directly to Wikidata yet). Wikispecies isn't auto-linked for a similar reason: because they're articles have species under their scientific names while Wikipedia articles take vernacular names. Scientific names must be entered manually. But us? There's really no valid reason.

It could be said that they don't want to automatically add links to a travel guide from an article on say, a person. But then there's an inconsistent approach. You don't "define" people in a dictionary. You can't have "quotations" by a building. You can't have up-to-date "news" on an event that took place 100 years ago. There shouldn't be a double standard that is biased against us. I think we should start a discussion on the talk page of that template, arguing for Wikivoyage's automatic inclusion. That would bring thousands more links and also save us having to go through every location article adding voy=location to it. Thoughts? JamesA ^>talk 07:58, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

As a Wikipedia editor/admin, I would support it. Wikidata is in its own category entirely as it's a database and has all sorts of different software because of that. --Rschen7754 08:33, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Can Google be contacted and the situation explained? Seriously...would it be reasonable to contact Google & let them know that this site is the legitimate heir to WT content. I tried finding an appropriate contact email, but they probably receive so many emails that it would be highly unlikely a real person would read an email and take any action. However, anyone tech-savvy enough might be able to find the right topic on Google's website to get this site higher in the results. It also might be worth posting a question on the Webmaster forums, where an employee might pick up the discussion and get our site bumped up. Links: Contact, Webmaster forums, Webmaster tools & help, Site not doing well in search.

It might also be worth bringing up on a relevant inter-wiki forum, like some place on Meta. AHeneen (talk) 09:40, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Knowing how large and evil Google is, they're probably already well aware of the situation and how it came about. While it is possible someone higher up in the WMF could contact their Google contacts (which I'm sure they have considering Wikipedia is on nearly every Google results page), I don't think much will come of it. There's no harm in trying, as Google apparently supports the open, free community. Another thing: Google purchased Frommers recently, so may be working on a competitor, in which case, we're in serious trouble. JamesA ^>talk 10:26, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

I strongly suggest that everyone puts more effort into developing and implementing new features related to maps, listings, mobile version, offline version, etc: anything that makes WV different from (and better than) WT. The content has been copied, the links have been redirected — that's all fine, but it only makes us a good copy (fork, sibling, whatever...) of WT. I think it's time to go further and intensively work on new features and ideas instead of discussing how to persuade Google. --Alexander (talk) 14:19, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

• Question. Is anyone working on doing something about "links" to Wikitravel like the one on the bottom on Poipet#Go_next? If there are many like this a bot should be able to do the task. In fact a template would be better. --MGA73 (talk) 16:41, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

These links are using rel="nofollow". I don't know whether it matters or not=) --Alexander (talk) 16:59, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

The rel="nofollow" was only added yesterday; it could take months for the full effect of such a change to be reflected by Google as it must index every page on the site, one by one. K7L (talk) 20:21, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

I mean is it not better to change the link to Wikivoyage instead? --MGA73 (talk) 10:02, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

• Notice - I've started a discussion here on Wikipedia, regarding auto-inclusion. It's successful passing could mean thousands of extra links for us. I'd appreciate some supportive comments. Thanks, JamesA ^>talk 07:35, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

New SEO Expedition

Swept in from the pub

There's a lot of ideas floating around lately about increasing our Google ranking and ensuring we are the most popular travel wiki on the web. I think the best way to go forward would be a new expedition focused on improving these aspects of our site. It cannot be emphasized enough how important it is to move up the Google rankings, as the site can't be successful if we don't have many viewers. Of course, more viewers will naturally come with more content and better quality, but we already do that quite well. The following is some suggestions and ideas I had that the Expedition could focus on:

• Useful addition of the Wikivoyage template to Wikipedia articles
• The continuous project of removing that site which cannot be named links from WMF wikis
• Working on improving cross-linking between other WMF wikis such as Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Commons, etc
• Verifying and monitoring our Alexa profile
• Promoting the inclusion of a "As featured on Wikivoyage" badge on tourist bureau websites about high-standard articles
• Working on the widespread inclusion of Wikivoyage links on dmoz
• Other common SEO techniques and alternative methods of garnering attention

I think in the long-run, a focused project with set goals will be very beneficial. Thoughts? JamesA ^>talk 08:43, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

That sounds like a great idea to me. Attracting people through Google is absolutely key to our success. Is there already an "As featured on Wikivoyage" badge, or does one need to be made? --Nicholasjf21 (talk) 12:01, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps we should be contacting the owners of non-WMF sites which still link to the old wiki, explain the situation (perhaps with a link to the NYT coverage) and ask that they update their links? DMOZ is limited as they only link any given site once, the cleanup of WT templates from obscure foreign languages in Wikipedia is ongoing, not sure how much Alexa can do for us as they're just a traffic counter. The main concern should be to update inbound links to point to WV. K7L (talk) 19:55, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Let's start it, at least it will be a gathering point for this discussion and a few others going on. I don't suppose we can think of a better name than SEO Expedition? --Inas (talk) 23:03, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that: it'll definitely need a much better name. I couldn't think of anything good at the time! JamesA ^>talk 06:02, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Search expedition? K7L (talk) 18:50, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

• Notice - I've created the Expedition as a trial at Wikivoyage:Search Expedition. The name can always be changed later :) Please join and help me out, everyone! JamesA ^>talk 00:37, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Google, links and copied text

Article that have completely copied text and no WP links, seem to not rate on Google at all. Like, way off the 15th page or something stupid. I'm currently experimenting with Picton. I've created the new article Picton (New South Wales) that doesn't exist on WT or WV until I created it. The links to Picton (New Zealand) weren't on WP. I'm slowly adding these links, rearranging text, and monitoring the Google Rank, to see how this affects it. As a basis for this, I'm noting that our recently updated policy articles and the pub seem to rank okay - as the content is unique. --Inas (talk) 03:01, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I like the experiment you're undertaking to check Google's rank decisions. It is true that articles that are near identical to WT will rank very, very far down the list. It may be worth making a list of our largest articles, and having users go through and modify/rewrite a lot of the content to make us unique. JamesA ^>talk 06:44, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm trying to do something similar with North Vancouver. Right now, if I type "North Vancouver travel guide", it doesn't show up in the Google search at all. If I make the search "North Vancouver travel guide voyage", the WV page shows up #2 or #3. I just added a link from WP tonight, plus I'll keep updating the sections and see if that helps at all. -Shaundd (talk) 06:48, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

It's so annoying, especially when added the word "voyage" still doesn't bring it to the top. It'd be interesting to see what happens now. Please add your name here if you're interested in helping! :) JamesA ^>talk 07:00, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Google Webmaster Tools

Doesn't anyone know if anybody on other WMF sites is given access to the Google Webmaster Tools? It could be useful to see how effective expedition is? --Inas (talk) 03:21, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that would certainly be a good idea. Is there a way to set up multiple accounts to monitor the one website, so any interested administrator could take part? I believe it is possible for us to set up the Webmaster Tools ourselves, along with verification on WOT and Alexa. However, you need admin rights, and I don't have them (just yet, I was meant to get them today actually :P ). The process would be to "upload" a HTML file to the website, which equates to creating a page here which is restricted to admins due to the .html tag at the end. After I'm given the rights, I'd be more than happy to do all 3. JamesA ^>talk 06:51, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I think the "verification" requires actual access to the servers, not just the 'admin' status of being able to (un)block users and (un) delete pages on the wiki. K7L (talk) 13:19, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Apparently verification could be done through adding temporary keywords, but it seems admins are actually not able to edit keywords through those MediaWiki links on the main expedition page. I will attempt to contact WMF tech support and request the code additions so that I (and other admins) will have access to WOT, Alexa and Google Webmaster. JamesA ^>talk 03:44, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Did you do this yet ? --Inas (talk) 22:27, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

No, sorry. I've been reaaallly busy. I got verification through WOT, however, by personally applying. The other two probs wouldn't do that. Please feel free to do it yourself if you have time. JamesA ^>talk 12:10, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

• Notice - I've been verified as a site administrator on WOT, so have responded to the IB comments. I have also created a Quantacast account for us, but have not 'Quanitified' us as that requires further community discussion and WMF assistance. Alexa will also need some WMF assistance that I am seeking. JamesA ^>talk 04:53, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Post the link please, James. -- Alice^✉ 06:39, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

What would you like linked? Our Quantacast profile is here, as mentioned on the project page, although there is no visible change there. Our WOT profile is here, but there is no visible change either apart from my response. I also forgot to mention that I created a new Wikivoyage email account for cases where we need to register somewhere. So far, I've only used it on Quantacast. I will gladly hand over the log-in details to any administrator who wishes to use/access the account. JamesA ^>talk 06:46, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

WP Interwiki links appearing above WV native links

Also, current a google search for some of our policies "wikivoyage be fair", "wikivoyage copyright", returns the interwiki link from WP above the native WV link. Curious. Google certainly likes WP and WT. So many extlinks can't be wrong. --Inas (talk) 05:26, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Better search results by talking about Wikivoyage

One of the criteria for higher ranking on search engines is how often site page is referenced and talked about from elsewhere. Not a small task but we need to start answering questions on blogger, discussion groups, Facebook, Twitter, etc. with links back to Wikivoyage pages. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:15, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

That is another excellent idea. All those sites will be useful, but I see our key resource as the Thorn Tree Forum [2] over on Lonely Planet. Already we've had 6 people reference us! [3] Just answering requests with some basic info, then a link back to the source here will be a great improvement. JamesA ^>talk 07:22, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Private discussion

As per this, it's clear that the IBadmins are monitoring our every move. They managed to make an account on WOT and post a negative review on our profile there within hours of me posting the link. I guess they have nothing better to do with their time, now that no one edits WT. Anyway, I think it brings up some concerns with them copying our ideas. I'd suggest possibly moving this Expedition to a private forum/mailing list, where members must opt in, so that we can discuss the many more ideas to come without them being immediately plagiarised. Thoughts? JamesA ^>talk 07:26, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

As usual, you're not wrong, James. Click on the little red envelope in my signature to e-mail me. -- Alice^✉ 08:24, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure it matters that much. I'm for totally ignoring our friends over at IB. Lets just proceed to make our site the most popular we can, by creating the best and most innovative content, and letting people know about it. If IB choose to create controversy, it isn't a bad thing. Let's hold the high ground. --Inas (talk) 09:55, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I agree, but it's not just stirring up trouble. IBadmins could easily copy any keywords we decide to add, so that they are always above us in the rankings, and various other things that improve the search ranking of their site, and decreases ours. That's not just about who plays dirty games, but who has the more successful site. JamesA ^>talk 10:02, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

It is all about the community of contributors. A handfull IBadmins can not compete with the volume of good information and updates that a strong community can contribute. --NJR ZA (talk) 14:00, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

True if you're considering our main goal of creating a good travel guide; however, here we are rather narrowly concentrating on publicity and SEO and we should not underestimate the damage that can be done by a concerted campaign of mis-information - you only need to look at the soaring cases of whooping cough and diptheria because of vaccination objectors to see that, sadly. -- Alice^✉ 01:09, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Our priority is new, accurate and up-to-date information. It's always been our priority. But IB is not a group to be underestimated, with their numerous financial resources. I've seen numerous situations like ours, especially over at Wikia where I used to edit. A few years ago, Wikia's corporate board forced a new skin on all wikis, which meant about three times as much ads, a very confusing layout and constant popups. Vector, Monobook and other skins were outlawed. For many communities, it was the final straw and they jumped ship. My particular community decided against that. Notable communities that forked from Wikia and consequently failed due to SEO and traffic issues include WoWWiki, WikiSimpsons, Halopedia, SmashWiki, The Vault and others. (see w:Wikia#Domain_and_skin_assimilation) As far as I know, despite nearly all of the community forking and more content, most of these failed and Wikia wikis still lead the Google rankings. JamesA ^>talk 04:01, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

One key difference between Wikivoyage and this collection of wikis; we have Wikimedia behind us. Google weights Wikipedia results very strongly. That leaves us a huge task of cleaning up this mess, of trying to wake anyone with ability to update anything at DMOZ, of contacting the owners of non-WMF sites which had linked to WT, of ensuring that any usable/guide articles here which link to wikipedia: have the corresponding sibling links back and that those links point directly to the article instead of to a Special:Search page. The sooner this can be done, the sooner search engines will start penalising WT for being duplicate content and an outdated copy of WV. We also need to remain visible on WP to attract new editors from that project. The task is about as far from glamorous as sorting through the two thousand pages with images still missing, but completing it will make it easier for new editors to find us and join us in creating a good travel guide. K7L (talk) 17:11, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

More prominent link from Wikipedia

I think it is evident from the Alexa data that links from Wikipedia have a drastic effect on the number of visitors to Wikivoyage (the peak around mid-January coincides with banner announcing the launch of Wikivoyage that was displayed for a week at the top of every Wikipedia article.) Unfortunately the current links from Wikipedia to Wikivoyage are buried at the bottom of often quite long articles on various countries and cities. Perhaps we should place those links at a slightly more prominent place? I've made a mock-up at Wikipedia:User:Ruud Koot/Sandbox/Rome. —Ruud 22:10, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

That would be grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat for both the human and the arachnid traffic.

Perhaps we should have a separate section on the project page where Wikipedians can indicate their Wikipedia user name and then co-ordinate their discussions at Wikipedia - or is that still frowned upon? -- Alice^✉ 22:19, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

The mock-up looks interesting. Another spot where it could go is at the bottom of the first, large template on the right (what we would call on WV the quickbar). Wikipedia doesn't like "tourist attractions" on their pages. However, some pages have a "tourism" section. On pages which do have a "tourism" section, maybe we can put the Wikivoyage template in that section. All these proposed changes, however, will be tricky to implement...it will be very hard to get the blessing of the Wikipedia community to change their policy and allow the Wikivoyage link in a location other than in the last section. AHeneen (talk) 23:18, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Also, let's see if this has any effect on search results. According to Alexa "trekking in nepal" is one of the highest impact search queries for WT, but it will never make for an encyclopedic article. —Ruud 00:29, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

[4] Ha. —Ruud 01:30, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

A very good example why some topics are best not discussed so transparently...

You see who did the templating (their only contribution so far to the English Wikipedia)? -- Alice^✉ 04:39, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, if I have seen that earlier I would have blocked him on-sight instead of opening an SPI. Perhaps this will reveal some additional sleeper accounts, though. —Ruud 09:57, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Time to fetch a laundry basket? Socks are coming out in the wash, this and this are the same user. K7L (talk) 17:37, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

A heads up that all the socks I pulled in that SPI case have been locked by stewards. Well done guys, stay vigilant. WilliamH (talk) 14:18, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Templates

I've gone through Travel topics and added templates to dozens of WP pages. This is something that could be done by a bot, but is much better handled by a person for a couple reasons: 1) it's placed in the right spot (more visible), 2) placed on the right page (many travel topics are missing a WP link), & 3) links to the same WV page are placed in multiple, related WP pages. I've gone through the travel topics through "health". However, feel free to go back through the WP linked to and look for related pages where the WV template can be added. Once travel topics are done, phrasebooks (on respective WP language pages), and itineraries (when appropriate) need to be added. I'm curious as to what WP policy allowed the w:Trekking in Nepal page to be created as a redirect to WV. AHeneen (talk) 17:10, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

This would appear to fall into the same category as w:Attention whore and w:Cocksucker. Both are protected soft redirects to Wiktionary (in an identical format) for topics which don't have an article with that name in Wikipedia. K7L (talk) 17:52, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

I think there is specific WP policy guidance on this here. -- Alice^✉ 01:48, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

It's actually the next section down on that page: Soft redirects from Wikipedia to a sister project. There appear to be three criteria for such pages to exist: 1) the page should cover a topic that does not deserve an article on WP, 2) there is not an appropriate article to redirect to, and 3) the page should be commonly wikified (and likely to be recreated if deleted). To quote: "Please keep in mind that only commonly wikified words should become soft redirects. We don't need a soft redirect for every possible word or phrase to be included in Wikipedia.". This gives us a limited scope to work with.

We should probably reciprocate. For popular tourist attractions, a disambiguation template would say something like: "[Name] is found in [location] and travel information for [name] can be found at [location]. For more about [name], see [Wikipedia page]." For example, Sydney Opera House does not deserve its own page. It's disambiguation page would read: "Sydney Oprah House is found in Sydney and travel information for Sydney Oprah House can be found at Sydney/City Center. For more about Sydney Oprah House, see Sydney Oprah House on Wikipedia." Travel topics would need different wording. Using a template would be tricky, so that the words sound right, but would keep wording consistent. For topics which could be developed into a proper WV travel topic, a line about plunging forward and starting a page on the topic would be necessary. Travel topics like w:2014 FIFA World Cup, w:Skiing in Australia, w:Hillwalking, w:Ski resort, w:Long distance motorcycle riding, & w:Travel magazine would be topics worth the inter-wiki disambiguation between WP page specifically covering the topic and related Wikivoyage page(s), hopefully helping us when people type such topics in search engines (combination of topic and association of Wikivoyage with travel). Having lots of disambiguation pages like this would be really great for search engine rankings, correct? It would also help users who search the site, instead of having to look through search results. The downside is that this is best done manually. AHeneen (talk) 03:11, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

How are we differentiating making a disambiguation page with a Wikipedia link from including that link in each listing in an article, and what would be the reasoning we'd use to explain the difference to other users? Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:24, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Village pump proposal

I've started a proposal at Wikipedia's Village pump. As to whether or not this proposal is accepted or not should be up to the Wikipedians, so I would suggest editors who are primarily active on Wikivoyage to either abstrain from "voting" or at least clear state their affiliation. —Ruud 18:42, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia Wikiproject

Is there a Wikiproject on Wikipedia to help coordinate activities across the two sites? If not, could one be set up? 86.44.163.139 22:55, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

I think coordination between our two sites would be within the scope of Wikipedia:WikiProject Travel and Tourism. That WikiProject is not terribly active, though, but still a better option than starting a wikiproject solely dedicated to WV-WP coordination. AHeneen (talk) 18:36, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Would one be necessary? We can just coordinate things here, and if Wikipedians want to comment on our actions, they can do so here: in one place. JamesA ^>talk 00:43, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

What do search engines see at WP?

When a WP page contains "{{Wikivoyage}}", what do search engines see? Do they see literally just "{{Wikivoyage}}", or something more, like http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Special:Search/Place_name? Just wondering how effective the template really is in improving rankings. Nurg (talk) 10:10, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

They see the exact same rendered HTML that gets send to your browser; not the plain wikitext. —Ruud 10:31, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

And they don't get Special:Search, they get a direct link (thankfully). JamesA ^>talk 11:25, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Spiders are told (in robots.txt) not to index links to special: pages. We therefore don't want to encourage creation of templates pointing to Special:Search when they should point directly to a destination - launching a search for something whose location is already known is a waste of time in any case, likely slower (for the server) and not encouraged by Wikipedia's external links policy. Not sure what's up with w:pt:template:correlatos, it only shows projects with explicitly specified targets, but is still a mess of dead or pointless "if no target specified, blindly invoke Special:Search/{PAGENAME}" coding instead of linking directly like w:fr:autres projets. It would seem that some other languages copied code from "sister project links", which in its original form was an ugly kludge based on just blindly going to every Wikimedia project with a Special:Search based on the current page name. As w:pt: has both "correlatos" and "correlatos simples" (the latter being the blind cross-wiki search) the correlatos really shouldn't be invoking this unnecessary special:search. Another thing to watch with blindly linking cross-wiki using {PAGENAME}: these links get tracked into other language Wikipedias when articles are translated, and a blind link to {PAGENAME} from a Georgian language Wikipedia to a Texan-language article on Wikivoyage will fail because the Georgian character set is not the same. (Russian is less of an issue as we have a Russian-language Wikivoyage). K7L (talk) 20:22, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Melbourne at WP has had a link to WV since 1 Dec 2012 and a 2nd link since 7 Feb 2013. But I don't see that article in the 1st 100 results when I Google:

melbourne wikivoyage site:en.wikipedia.org

Any idea why? Nurg (talk) 01:41, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

It irritates me, because I'm trying to improve the Melbourne article to a much better standard and I'd be sad if no one even looks at it. I think it's because Google thinks that our WV Melbourne article is a duplicate of the WT one, so they punish us. Over the next few days or so, I'll try and change up the content and improve the main article. We'll revisit after a few weeks and see if things improve. JamesA ^>talk 01:50, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

First results

For some searches on travel topics (e.g., "smoking travel" and "laundry travel wiki") we are now being listed above WT in Google. —Ruud 12:12, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

After creating Picton (New South Wales) here (it doesn't exist at WT), I've been slowly adding some content, and linking to WP. The article appears first for on a search for "Picton (New South Wales) wikivoyage". I haven't manage to devise any other search where it will appear in the first 10 pages of a good search. There are some very obscure pages, including a couple of WT pages for completely different destinations, that appear higher. --Inas (talk) 22:26, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

What do you get if you search for "wellsford travel guide" (without the quote marks). WP does not link to the article as yet, btw. Nurg (talk) 10:24, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

When I search for "wellsford travel guide" it's the sixth result for me on Google - looking good! --Nick (talk) 10:28, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage seems to appear high up the list when searching for new articles that weren't created on Wikitravel. This is true of some Bangladesh articles I've worked on, where "____ travel guide" usually gets first result! That's even without adding Wikipedia links. Google seems to punish us harshly for having identical content to Wikitravel, so it may be worth setting up a project (another expedition?) whose job it will be to rewrite/modify all our guide-standard articles so that we will not be counted as a duplicate. We wouldn't have to add new info or completely start from scratch, but just shift info around and express ideas differently. I think that will be important in at least getting us on the Google search results, then the Wikipedia links will eventually push us above Wikitravel. JamesA ^>talk 11:38, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

I would argue that we don't want to go down the path of having people change articles solely "to be different" - that will happen over time, and our goal should be first and foremost to create a great travel site, not to have the best Google rankings (the latter will follow the former). Creating more incoming links is a good idea, and some of the other suggestions in this expedition have been great, but part of rising in rankings will also be a matter of waiting - Wikivoyage has only been officially launched for 42 days, and Google penalizes new sites [5], so as we prove we're not going anywhere that will also help significantly in raising the rankings. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:52, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

For some reason, search engines seem to think that Wikivoyage:Don't tout is a good page. We have the top position for various bits of text from that page, including the included counter-example "Well-appointed rooms invite you to a wonderland". Go figure. We must be linking that page often lately? :) (The other possibility is that MSM coverage of our launch is linking there when raising the "this new travel wikipedia is going to attract all the spammers and pitchmen" question.)

As for the "new site" bit? Not sure on that, Wikivoyage has existed since 2006. K7L (talk) 19:17, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps someone who speaks German could run a few tests on German search terms to test the "new site" theory with some URLs that haven't changed since 2008. In my day-to-day work there is a lot of effort expended making sure URLs don't change or are updated with redirects, etc, to ensure both that bookmarks still work and that search engines don't think they've found a new page when an old page is moved to a new URL, thus sacrificing the SEO weighting of the old URL. -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:38, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Picton (New South Wales) is obviously not considered a new page. I can still only get it to appear in results at all by using the word wikivoyage in the search. However, Tarcoola, which I created yesterday, with very little content already appears on the front page google results.

As far as the "haven't been here long enough" is concerned, I think freshness is valued by Google. I know from a couple of blog articles I write, that they very quickly go to the top of the results, and fade away over time.

As for the "make deliberate changes to rankings" argument. No, I agree the changes will come with time. But I don't think we should shy away from making otherwise beneficial changes (improve section headings, improve listing format, etc) that will give us some divergence in the text. --Inas (talk) 22:13, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Well, Lake Alfred, which was created 18 Nov 2012 and thus not at WT, doesn't appear within the first 5 pages of results for "Lake Alfred" travel guide. Polk City, created 19 Nov 2012 and not at WT, appears at the bottom of the second page of Google search results. In both cases, the Wikipedia article appears at the top of the second page and the text excerpt displayed has "Travel guide from Wikivoyage". Both are small towns (<5000 people), so it's not like there's a lot of travel info on the web!AHeneen (talk) 04:25, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

For me, the Lake Alfred result comes in at number 9 on the first page. --Inas (talk) 04:48, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

I just double-checked and the Wikivoyage page is not found in the first 10 pages of results for either Lake Alfred travel guide or "Lake Alfred" travel guide. Now, the Wikipedia page is the last result on the first page when using quotation marks and the second result on the second page without using quotation marks. AHeneen (talk) 05:29, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

There's some major search localisation going on. The google.com.au results differ from the google.com results. Using Picton (New South Wales) as an example, 'picton new south wales travel guide' is second (out of 400k) in the .com domain, but nowhere in sight for .com.au (1.1m searches). I tried the same for Marina Bay, an already existing Singapore city district with no wp link, and it jumps up and down on 'marina bay travel guide' depending on domain (second page for .com.sg and .com.au, first page for .com). So they might not be seen at all by people already in the country because of Google's redirected local search. - Torty3 (talk) 06:12, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Google does both localization and personalization. If Google notices (through your account or even your underlying IP address) that you visit Wikivoyage a lot, it will likely list it higher in subsequent queries. You should be aware of this when comparing rankings. —Ruud 13:14, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

I forbid Google from keeping my search history. Therefore I would have thought this wouldn't have an effect. I'm seeing Picton (New South Wales) number 11 result now, and Tarcoola as number 10. It looks to me like if you have a new article here, link from Wikipedia, and don't have other specialist guides already in existence, the article will make the front page of google results. --Inas (talk) 23:44, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

It seems that both Mapcarta and Tripline have started pointing their links to us instead of WT. Both have a decent Alexa ranking a large number of backlinks. —Ruud 01:02, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Mmmm, intriguing new site, but can you provide an URL where I can see this? I only see links to Wikitravel here: http://tripline.net/waypoint/New_Zealand-6170477577521002A203B68C33D0FBB9

I do hope you're right, Ruud and keep developing that great parsing engine! -- Alice^✉ 01:18, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Google for "site:tripline.net wikivoyage". And even if you replace WV with WT the pages, or at least the few I checked, obviously not the one you just found, have already been updated to refer to WV.

There still seem to be a few other websites that link to WT on a large scale, some of which should be easy targets for "conversion", although I'm not quite sure if I should name names at this point. —Ruud 01:33, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Targeting mirror sites or sites that link to WT should be on the "Tasks" list. Maybe create a subpage with a list of known mirrors/link-sites and we will gradually contact them all? It may also be worth writing up a standard email letter. JamesA ^>talk 05:52, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

After pointing out to them that Wikitravel now includes a hotel booking tool, a large hotel booking site just replied to me that they will update their links before the end of next week. More mails are being written. —Ruud 22:38, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Nice work! Did you already know that the hotel booking site was using WT links, or did you obtain the backlinks from a list? There are some free tools out there that allow you to check a site's backlinks. I may be worth going through the list of WT backlinkers and encouraging them to make a fair decision regarding the current circumstances. JamesA ^>talk 00:49, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

I found the hotel booking site through Google a few days ago. I've since come across quite a useful tool to find backlinks. —Ruud 17:31, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

The hotel booking site appears to have changed their links at the bottom of articles to Wikivoyage, but I think the ones within the articles still point to WT - hopefully they'll get round to changing those too. --Nick (talk) 13:49, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Picton (New South Wales) that was my first experiment, is now on the first page of google results. So, it seems clear that new content with a single link from WP is sufficient to make the front page of Google results. Insufficient for bing, however. --Inas (talk) 04:57, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Link from www.wikipedia.org

Does anyone know what we would need to do to have Wikivoyage included as a sister project at the bottom of http://www.wikipedia.org/ ? We're already linked from http://en.wikipedia.org/, but a link from the root page would be helpful as well. -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:52, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

These screens are stored as templates, such as meta:www.wikipedia.org template. Ask on the talk page there. K7L (talk) 23:16, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I've commented at meta:Talk:Www.wikipedia.org template#Re: Multiple updates needed. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:32, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

This is now done, and http://www.wikipedia.org now includes a link to Wikivoyage (meta:Talk:Www.wikipedia.org template#Sandbox). -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:34, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

http://www.wikinews.org/ and http://wikisource.org/ also need to be updated. The process appears to be similar as for Wikipedia (above) if anyone else wants to do it, otherwise I'll follow up. I think all of the other projects include links to Wikivoyage, but if someone could confirm it would be appreciated. -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:56, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Pagerank

Heads up - our pagerank dropped from 6 to 0 last week. --Peter ^Talk 17:15, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

My understanding is this is just for http://en.wikivoyage.org page. The wikivoyage.org page is better, as is a page like en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Chicago. Still a bit of a mystery why it would drop so sharply with little change. How are our webmaster tools coming along? Out current Chicago is 3, WT is 5. Both less than 6. --Inas (talk) 03:11, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

The European Union article is 8. --Inas (talk) 00:06, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

That's 'cos it's been hacked about considerably from when it was imported as a "REDIRECT". Page rank is hard to calculate any way now Google don't officially use it and not much of a guide to organic SERPS anyway (do a search on EUROPEAN UNION TRAVEL to see what I mean)... -- Alice^✉ 00:18, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

I have. I agree that it isn't such a big deal. Other pages that are new seem to rate much lower though, so it is curious. My primary concern is why the main page would drop from 6 to 0. That implies to me that Googlebot thinks there is something surreptitious going on. --Inas (talk) 00:30, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

It's called a "duplicate penalty", and in the short term (a year or two) the only way round it is to kick up enough of a stink that Google manually manipulates their results. They always pretend that they never manually override their (continually evolving) search algorithm, but if you kick up enough stink (as in lots of newspaper and magazine articles) they eventually will. Meanwhile, we would be well advised to re-visit some ancient (and patently stupid) policy decisions in a conscious effort to put as much blue water as possible between us and Wikitravel... I do my best, but I'm continually slapped down by some of the "traditionalists" that have no real conception of how important some of this stuff is to our potential readership. -- Alice^✉ 08:01, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't think you're right, in this case. A main page that is totally undup has google rank 0. Other pages that are identical have no such problem. I think there is something else going on here, focussed on the entry page. --Inas (talk) 08:40, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

The "duplicate penalty" is applied to the entire domain - not individual pages and, believe me, I wish I were wrong. Come back in a year or two and we'll have an answer if nothing else is done in the interim. It certainly does help mitigate the penalty if highly internally linked pages (such as the main page) don't have duplicated content. However, most of our article pages right now are linked to Wikitravel via the standard template on the bottom of each which says something like: "This article is derived from the article EU on wikitravel.org/en in its revision as of 22:05, 25 July 2008 (UTC)." even though, in this example, that statement is clearly mendacious since the Wikitravel article was simply a re-direct on that particular date! -- Alice^✉ 10:00, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

I clearly understand that. However, as I just said it doesn't explain the significant variation of page rank between the main page 0 and many other site pages that rate as high as 8. And exact dup pages having significantly higher page rank the main page. That is what I am addrsssing here. I understand that the site overall will have a lower rank. --Inas (talk) 10:31, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

As part of further experimentation, I'm going to delete and recreate Yowah. I'm the only author of that article, so there should be no attribution issues. --Inas (talk) 02:06, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't worry about this too much just yet. It seems that the Main Page, and only the Main Page, has been removed from Google's cache, but it still appears in search results. Furthermore we only seem to be crawled infrequently during Google's monthly or so deep crawls and not on more regular fresh crawls. So don't expect any changes here to have any instantaneous effect on Google's results as it often does on Wikipedia. —Ruud 10:10, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

I resubmitted the Main Page to Google and it's now back in the cache. The page rank still seems to be zero, however. —Ruud 22:35, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Bing

I know Google is a focus, but I've noticed that many pages don't even seem to be listed in bing. Even searching for the place name with wikivoyage doesn't bring them up. WT seems (anecdotally) to rate higher than in google. --Inas (talk) 00:55, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, we should consider other search engines. I'm also an occasional Bing user and become frustrated when trying to search for Wikivoyage and can't find it at all. Sometimes searching with "wikivoyage" does work, like saying "Qatar wikivoyage" (strangely enough, the Doha article ranks #1 instead of Qatar itself). I'm not sure what we can do about it. I presume the methods we use to improve Google ranking like fixing backlinks, changing interwiki links and removing duplicate content will work on Bing too, but is there certain Bing-specific methods? JamesA ^>talk 01:19, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes. And there are arcane SEO tricks (white hat, not black hat) with Google, too. But I'm certainly not going to spill the beans in a public forum like this one. I'll just say that I wish the people here playing silly buggers (they know who they are) with some tiny, otherwise trivial edits I make are shooting ourselves in both feet! -- Alice^✉ 05:54, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

I've submitted en.wikivoyage.org. The Bing webmaster tools are here. AHeneen (talk) 05:01, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

This Expedition's name

This probably isn't this expedition's top priority, but... :) One of this expedition's declared tasks is to find a better name for itself that's a bit more all-encompassing. As this expedition is now involved in a lot more things than just search engine optimisation, I think something more like 'Popularity Contest' would probably reflect the nature of this project better. --Nick (talk) 07:49, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good to me, Nick. -- Alice^✉ 09:36, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

I sort of like the double meaning of the current name. —Ruud 17:32, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree - it would be nice to have some sort of pun in there. Project Knife & Fork? :) --Nick (talk) 01:20, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

I propose the Who's ya daddy Expedition. Texugo (talk) 02:23, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Popularity Contest describes its purpose very well, but let's say it is a little too "in-your-face" and that we must be a little more diplomatic in our language. JamesA ^>talk 09:13, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

"Site promotion Expedition". Nurg (talk) 09:34, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

That could work, but is straddling the line of being touty. I'd support it, but would like to hear other opinions. JamesA ^>talk 09:57, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

'Voyage Around the World (Wide Web)'? --Nick (talk) 23:25, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

"Outreach Expedition"? Texugo (talk) 01:20, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

The suggestions have dried up. Let's decide on one. Nurg (talk) 06:28, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm a big fan of Popularity Contest. Its self-deprecating humor is disarming and rather Wikivoyagey ;) --Peter ^Talk 06:46, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

It could be seen as bad practice. Popularity contests have a very negative connotation where I come from. On one hand, we're dismissing ideas like a side-by-side comparison of the two sites as it looks like we're somehow resorting to low blows, yet we name one of our expeditions as "Popularity Contest" which is clearly against Wikitravel. JamesA ^>talk 07:10, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

My point was that the negative connotation is self-deprecating humor about SEO in general, which shows that we're not cutthroat and not taking ourselves too seriously. And I don't see why you think it means we're focused on Wikitravel—it's a popularity contest with every other site on the web! --Peter ^Talk 17:00, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

When I suggested the name I did mean it in the vein that Peter suggests - as a sort of tongue in cheek look at what we're doing here, rather than a serious attack on any other website. Maybe World Domination Expedition would be a better name? :) --Nick (talk) 17:58, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I won't oppose that name change, but I still feel it is a little too tongue-in-cheek and looks like we're playing the game of stealing audiences rather than improving our guides (which is obviously false). JamesA ^>talk 01:18, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh, but it is what we do: the same thing we do every day, James—try to take over the world! --Peter ^Talk 03:17, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Well that is Wikipedia's goal, so I guess it should be our goal too! >:D JamesA ^>talk 03:20, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Bump! - One final name suggestion - 'Profile Booster'! --Nick (talk) 16:21, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Expedition's purpose

There is a lot of overlap between this expedition and Wikivoyage:Ways to promote Wikivoyage. The introductory paragraphs for both are essentially the same in meaning. Effectively this expedition could be a subsidiary of the other page. Do we need to sharpen the focus of this page before settling on a new name for it? Or even merge the two? Nurg (talk) 03:00, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

That page is definitely a useful tool that we should utilise, but I think that and the Expedition are slightly different. While the page is there to give users tips on how to promote Wikivoyage, the Expedition is about bringing elements of the community together to discuss other ways of promoting our site. The Expedition is for users to work together to come up with ideas and work on specific projects. Already, on this talk page, we've come up with numerous ideas. Though I do feel like we need to choose a major idea, sort of like a 'Collaboration of the Month', and all work on it together to promote the project. Whether that be rewriting key articles and seeing if it affects search results, approaching mirror/link sites and asking them to swap to WV, creating banners for Tourist Bureau sites, etc.

By the way, Promotion Expedition is another name this expedition could take. JamesA ^>talk 09:55, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

That sounds like a workable name to me. --Nick (talk) 00:53, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

Giuseppe Arcimboldi

Someone should probably keep a close eye on this Twitter account. —Ruud 17:33, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

How to Report Spam on Twitter? K7L (talk) 18:11, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Well he seems to be doing more harm than good to himself, so far. You sort of have to wonder why he hasn't been fired for gross incompetence yet. —Ruud 23:55, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

http://wikitravel.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=User:IBobi&diff=next&oldid=1946416

That is interesting! --Nick (talk) 21:40, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

http://wikitravel.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=User%3AIBAlex&action=historysubmit&diff=2005168&oldid=1991029

Ooooh - how odd...! --Nick (talk) 23:12, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Call me a pessimist, but they're probably just trying to pretend they're part of the community instead of being on IB's payroll. —Ruud 14:17, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

That's what I was thinking. Funny though, that it is basically an admission on their part that being associated with IB might produce unwanted reactions/attention. Texugo (talk) 14:20, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

I think you're probably right, but it's still an interesting development nonetheless. --Nick (talk) 14:44, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Related to the above it looks like almost all reference to IB on the other travel wiki have been removed, whilst the Orbitz ads aren't appearing for me any more either - is something happening over there? (PS I'm not trying to turn this into a spying thread - I'm just curious!) --Nick (talk) 19:07, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

WV presences on Twitter and Facebook?

Slightly off topic, but are we any closer to sorting out the WV presences on Twitter and Facebook? I realise there's a separate page for this, but it sort of come under the remit of improving our popularity. --Nick (talk) 00:06, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

As I stated elsewhere, I contacted the page admin of the most popular Wikivoyage page on Facebook, but never received a response. As I am getting a little impatient, I will be trying to make contact with the WMF and Facebook over the next few days so that we can "claim" the page under our ownership, due to WMF trademarks. JamesA ^>talk 09:20, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

I think both the Facebook and Twitter account are still operated by the Germans, to it would be best to contact them. I don't think you want to try and "steal" it from them. —Ruud 11:07, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

The Germans operate the 'Wikivoyage - deutsch' page and another "Wikivoyage" page meant to be interlingual that only has a handful of likes. The largest, main English page is run by an unknown user who we've been unable to determine. See [6]. JamesA ^>talk 12:07, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Edit stats

The comparative edit stats, article and comments from Peter Daams of Travellerspoint are interesting. Ruud posted it in the pub but it's worth noting here too. Nurg (talk) 23:27, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm confident that 'Soren' at the bottom of those comments is IBobi - the account's profile picture matches the only image uploaded by him here. --Nick (talk) 16:09, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, but 'Søren' with the same first/last name but with slashes through the Øs is a legitimate user. Doppelganger? Impersonation? K7L (talk) 23:10, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

He really is everywhere isn't he. (Hi Paul!).. Good find with the dup images though, Nick, you should post that on google plus. --Inas (talk) 22:59, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Almost tempting to print off a pile of the shill posts and send them to WT's advertisers with an explanation that the site looks to be spamming heavily and might be more of an embarrassment than it's worth? K7L (talk) 03:55, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

I'd strongly, strongly suggest drawing a clear line between actions that promote Wikivoyage and those that might be seen as attacking Wikitravel, and that we stay firmly on the "promoting Wikivoyage" side of that line. While the apparent w:Astroturfing against Wikivoyage is hugely dismaying, let's maintain the moral high ground. That said, it might make sense to put together a page that captures some of the suspected astroturfing as a reference for when people ask about those comments (for example: [7] or [8]), but beyond that, I think we're best ignoring it to the greatest extent possible. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:29, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Seconded. Several of Paul's comments backfired on him and we really don't ever want to get into that position. I think it would be a good idea to expand the Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel pages, so we can point people somewhere if they get, understandably, confused about the whole situation. —Ruud 11:48, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

WWW Redirect

I've just discovered that www.en.wikivoyage.org, does not bring users here, but redirects them to Meta. Could that be hurting our search rankings? --Nick (talk) 01:02, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

I just tested that & Firefox complains that the security certificate is invalid for that name. Pashley (talk) 12:39, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

"The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.wikipedia.org, wikipedia.org, m.wikipedia.org, zero.wikipedia.org, *.m.wikipedia.org, wikibooks.org, m.wikibooks.org, *.wikibooks.org, *.m.wikibooks.org, wikidata.org, m.wikidata.org, *.wikidata.org, *.m.wikidata.org, wikimedia.org, m.wikimedia.org, *.wikimedia.org, *.m.wikimedia.org, wikimediafoundation.org, m.wikimediafoundation.org, *.wikimediafoundation.org, *.m.wikimediafoundation.org, wikinews.org, m.wikinews.org, *.wikinews.org, *.m.wikinews.org, wikiquote.org, m.wikiquote.org, *.wikiquote.org, *.m.wikiquote.org, wikisource.org, m.wikisource.org, *.wikisource.org, *.m.wikisource.org, wikiversity.org, m.wikiversity.org, *.wikiversity.org, *.m.wikiversity.org, wikivoyage.org, m.wikivoyage.org, *.wikivoyage.org, *.m.wikivoyage.org, wiktionary.org, m.wiktionary.org, *.wiktionary.org, *.m.wiktionary.org, mediawiki.org, *.mediawiki.org, m.mediawiki.org, *.m.mediawiki.org, *.zero.wikipedia.org

Mail from Mapcarta

Hi Ruud,

Nice to hear from you and its cool of you to support Wikivoyage. As you may guess I'm a big fan of Wikivoyage and am glad that you support re-using content. We do try to use the content ethically given the constraints that we earn money from the site. Thanks as well for your kind support.

The nofollow attributes were a mistake. They are a carry-over from the days of Wikitravel. When we switched to Wikivoyage we forgot to remove them. But no worries. I've fixed that and they've all now all gone.

Thank you also for the reference to Mapcarta. Its helpful as we do virtually no marketing of our own.

I believe a great way in which you could help us and also open the door to other mashups and maps on Wikivoyage would be to set up the goal of having accurate coordinates for every Wikivoyage destination. At the moment it seems that only about 60% of Wikivoyage destinations have coordinates. Unfortunately for Mapcarta that means we're providing a poor user experience because we can't associate those places on the map or get accurate photos or hotels without coordinates.

Also please let me know if you have any other suggestions, especially in regards to improving our relationship with Wikivoyage or in ways we can help support the project.

Kind regards,

<name redacted> Mapcarta.com

That's very nice of them. It sounds like a good relationship for us to have. It sounds like now we could do with accelerating our attempts to add co-ordinates to articles. Could we use a bot? --Nick (talk) 00:37, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

I thought project:script nominations had mentioned a 'bot already being run here to link WV articles to WP city-level articles and grab the city-level co-ordinates. K7L (talk) 03:13, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

The word "travel"

The word "travel" does not appear in our sidebar, header or footer ("travellers' pub" being the closest). Would it make sense to change the "Destinations" link text to "Travel destinations"? Is there some other way to get the word "travel" to appear at least once on most pages? Without the ability to add a meta description or other keywords it seems we're possibly doing ourselves a disservice by leaving out the most relevant term we expect people to use when searching for our site. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:38, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Is there an extension we can install to have keywords? I'm pretty sure they form an integral part of SEO, so we should take advantage of them. If not, 'Travel destinations' sounds good. It might provide a bit more consistency, as all the other links in that top navigation have two words. JamesA ^>talk 04:07, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

I've made the change to MediaWiki:Sidebar, and think it's an improvement in clarity, SEO questions aside. --Peter ^Talk 04:37, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Peter. James - re: keywords, having just looked into this it now appears that meta keywords and meta descriptions are no longer relevant for search ranking purposes ([9]) - apparently I need a refresher in the latest SEO tricks. The latest Google guidelines are at [10], and the fact that we now have the word "travel" in the page text (and the page title) helps us fulfill the recommendation to "think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it." -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:56, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

I've greatly expanded the keywords in MediaWiki:Keywords & MediaWiki:Keywords-0. I honestly don't understand exactly what the difference between these are and how they function, but assume they are invisible keywords that are associated with our site. The terms on each are identical. I've included a variety of synonyms for travel as well as other travel-related terms. The original version did not have spaces "wikivoyage,travel,travel guide,trips,tourism...", is that necessary for this feature to function? AHeneen (talk) 02:24, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Does anyone know what MediaWiki:Keywords does? I think we need to be careful about possibly creating spammy meta keywords as that can adversely affect SEO if you're seen to be trying to game the system. Currently, however, I don't see a meta keywords tag in the source. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:05, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Absolutely nothing. MediaWiki does not emit them anymore and if it would, Google would simply ignore them. —Ruud 03:09, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Does anybody even read that?

Swept in from the pub

Hey guys! I've started editing Wikivoyage last week or so and it's been fun to get back to wikiediting, as well as being able to share my travelling tips and insights in a, hopefully, lasting way. Hats off, kudos, congratulations and thanks to everybody involved in creating, maintaining and developing this project, including each and every editor.

That said, after a few fun moments the thought started nagging me: does anybody even read that?

So I went to Alexa and saw that:

• [11]
• and in particular that: [12]

What do you guys make of it?

It seems like after a short peak after WV's launch, apparently aided by a campaign at Wikipedia, the site's popularity is waning and not even touching WikiTravel. There seem to be trends affecting most travel websites and WV is out. That, and the humorous bit about WV's visitor group:

Based on internet averages, wikivoyage.org is visited more frequently by males who are over 65 years old, have no children, are graduate school educated and browse this site from school.

...signifies to me that there may be little more than enthusiastic wikieditors that actually come over, and the graphs do not give away any trend for this changing.

Is this site going to be a wikimaniacs' little secret and a fun playground, or is there a plan and effort to make it a more popular point of reference. It's still fun editing even for a single person who'd ever read that, but I just wanted to know where the community sees, plans and wants it headed.

Kindest, PrinceGloria (talk) 06:23, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

I think we need to start thinking more mobile and web based and less making sure the pages are printable. This is were the majority of users are. Making the experience interesting, informative and useful for the person using a smart phone, in-car browser and tablets is important. For example go to a location page and dial straight to a restaurant. Do we have a project for mobile connections? Also more links from other sites such as GoogleEarth markers. However the most important thing is probably more content. Finding useful information on a first visit is the only think that brings people back again.Traveler100 (talk) 07:04, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for replying. While I might agree with you on some accounts, I believe this is not the major problem. The experience is indeed extremely important, but for now to me it seems that awarness, traffic, and then engagement are more important at that point. There seems to be very little awareness and/or willingness to visit WV at this point. I do not think the lack of a mobile version is the culprit. I also believe there is enough content to justify visitor levels on part with WikiTravel, after all the content is to a large extent the very same. PrinceGloria (talk) 07:13, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

PS. On a totally separate note that warrant a SEPARATE discussion, I would actually more often prefer to print out things than access from my smartphone, due to roaming charges and simple practicality of wanting to have my maps and notes with me at all times. I believe for now, WV is pretty average on both accounts. It is good for browsing, but not optimized for printing either, lacks maps, customization properties et al. I still do believe those are things that should ever be discussed down the road, if the users ever show up to make those for them.

This is a problem that will most likely solve itself over time. By way of avoiding redundant commentary, you might want to have a look at this thread where a similar issue was discussed (relevant section begins with the comment by me, timestamped 11:51, 11 March 2013). -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 07:20, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

PrinceGloria - see Wikivoyage:Search Expedition and its discussion page. Nurg (talk) 10:35, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Our Alexa figures have got worse over the last couple of weeks, not so much in terms of the number of visitors (our reach has generally remained a bit above 0.004%)[13] as the number of pages they view once they get here. This has plummeted from 10-15 (in February and early March) down to around 5, almost as bad as WT.[14] The last big drop we had was during the launch; I don't see why there would be a similar drop now. There is a similar drop in the time spent on site.[15]

So while we should certainly try to get more visitors, this recent change seems to be more about what people do once they get here. I don't think Alexa's clickstream data sheds much light on this, although it's not good to read that people go to Google as they leave us more often than than they use Google to reach us. Anyway, maybe we shouldn't worry too much about short-term changes like this, especially when Alexa's figures seem to have other peculiarities. They say more of our visitors come from New Zealand (7.7%) than the United States (6.8%), for instance. --Avenue (talk) 02:45, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

I have a good explanation for the New Zealand thing - I've read that somebody did their best to take care of an article about a town in New Zealand in terms of external links to it, Google positioning et al. It also seems that this article did not have a WT counterpart. This only shows how very few visitors does WV have, so that a little factor like that can affect visitor count. PrinceGloria (talk) 06:01, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Where did you read that? At Wikivoyage_talk:Search_Expedition#First_results or somewhere else? Nurg (talk) 10:32, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

I might have thought of that one indeed. To us up North it is easy to confuse NSW with NZ ;) --PrinceGloria (talk) 11:30, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh, c'mon. We're ranked 7,700th out of millions upon millions of websites on the web. I don't think it is accurate to say linking to a small NZ town from Wikipedia changed the whole mechanics of our audience and made us most popular with New Zealanders :P While I agree that we need to improve readership, we are not at all "completely ignored" as far as I can tell, and the fairly high Alexa ranking shows that. JamesA ^>talk 13:13, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

A better explanation for the New Zealand thing is that Alexa results aren't really worth the paper you'd print them out on.[16] SimilarWeb gives a more sensible regional breakdown (keeping in mind that the period covered extends back before our launch),[17] although it seems a bit optimistic about Australia. It also seems odd that they think "Private Massage In Tbilisi" is one of the main searches leading people here. --Avenue (talk) 13:58, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Thank you so much for that, I got a much-needed kick out of "Private Massage in Tbilisi"! SimilarWeb sure has nicer graphics and clearer way of presenting their info, but I guess what really counts is not whether we rank as 7000th, 70000th or whichever site in the whole world, but how many people actually come over and read articles, especially those not editing them. I know such statistics were accessible sometime ago at Wikipedia, it would be great to know that readership is growing, regardless of whether they came her searching for [private massage in Tbilisi] or architecture in Helsinki. PrinceGloria (talk) 16:11, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Wow, the stats between those two websites seem to vary very much! I would also like to see a WMF-sanctioned statistics like used to exist on Wikipedia, as those are some strange search terms. JamesA ^>talk 08:15, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I believe our traffic will go up considerably once Google figures out that we're the better source for this data. LtPowers (talk) 14:14, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Should we rewrite key destinations a bit?

Sorry if I'm doubling an already existing discussion somewhere. I was just wondering.. If I understood correctly we're being left out of search results because the content is a copy of content over at WT. That makes sense. Surely that'll change over time as content here evolves, but would rewriting parts of the most-searched-for destinations speed up that process? Do we know what the most searched for destinations are (or rather were, back at WT)? JuliasTravels (talk) 13:15, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

That would probably help, as pages that are either new or have had their content changed significantly rank much higher on Google, sometimes in the top 10. (e.g., try searching for "travellers' pub" or "picton new south wales travel".)

Google Panda severely penalizes duplicated content, although we seem to be getting hit than some other mirrors, perhaps because we're pretty still pretty "young".

However, I don't think we should be making changes purely for SEO reasons. On the other hand, fixing up poor grammar and outdated listings and other content expansion or improvement can never hurt.

A few of the most visited articles can be found at [18], but they are the obvious ones: the articles featured on the main page, the continents and capital cities (London, Paris, Rome, ...)

—Ruud 16:40, 27 March 2013 (UTC

Well, the idea that we shouldn't make changes purely for SEO reasons seems obvious, but I'm not sure it is. Thinking more about it, I don't really see why not. Of course we would never want to decrease quality of wording, but as long at quality is improved or at least kept the same, it actually seems like a good use of time. I mean: in terms of accelerator effects for the development of Wikivoyage, an hour spent increasing search engine visibility might have a far bigger positive impact than an hour spent on fixing stubs for remote villages in rural India. For me, having unique intros and other text for top destinations would be a good thing in any case, for SEO reasons but also to distinguish ourselves in the eyes of visitors. Also, capitals and other well-developed articles are not the ones that suffer a whole lot from bad grammar, missing sections and such problems. Without an active approach, they are likely to be the articles that will be developing least of all, won't they? JuliasTravels (talk) 17:20, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

There will likely be a lot of pushback on any effort to change articles when the primary goal is SEO-related, since that doesn't directly focus on the goal of writing the best possible travel guides. However, more efforts like Wikivoyage:Country surgeon Expedition that have a clearly-designed set of goals for improving high-visibility articles would be welcome, and a side-effect of those efforts will be that our articles begin to distinguish themselves from other travel wikis. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:29, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure it necessarily is worth changing articles just for SEO purposes as I think the rewards will be pretty limited! My veryu little experience with SEO has shown that you need an awful lot of effort to cause a fairly small change over a long period of time. As Ruud and Ryan have said, we might be better just editing as normal - improving existing pages and creating new ones. Unfortunately, I don't think there is a 'quick fix' here. --Nick (talk) 19:20, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

It's not purely for SEO and it's not about quick fixes. I do think creating unique content is a goal and it would be silly to overlook all the most visited places in that light. I'm just trying to think how (my) energy is best spent. To me personally, there are two ways of editing. On one side there's the places I've been to, that I know, and have knowledge to share about. On the other side however, there's the work you just do for the general good of the site: fixing stubs of places you've never heard of, cleaning up bad grammar etc. And in that category, I don't particularly mind what article I'm editing. I do however prefer larger impact :-) I think creating visibility and thus attracting new editors is key, as we will never write the "best" travel guide with our current active users alone. And clearly, popular articles will have a bigger influence on that than remote places. I'm not saying anyone should do anything, I was just asking about the effects of changing high profile articles. So, thank you for that :-) (ps: The Country surgeon Expedition was a good one indeed, I should look at it again.) JuliasTravels (talk) 21:49, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

It would be hard to do this with some of our star articles, which are already really well written, and honestly a bit hard to improve on. It kills me that the immense work I put into, say, Washington, D.C. and Chicago comes at our expense simply because it was done pre-migration, but I don't want to rewrite either if they are star-quality. The district articles, though, require more updates, which is good. --Peter ^Talk 23:51, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh, agreed, I wouldn't dare :-) Frankly I wouldn't even know hów to improve Chicago more than in small details perhaps ;-) Rewriting any of those top articles would be a pointless exercise. Despite the good collection we have though, it's a limited number. What I'm rather talking about is something like.. say...South Africa, France, Berlin or India. Key destinations, much searched for and okay articles, but with plenty of room for improvement. Rewriting their intros, for example, wouldn't per se be a priority as they are functional, but I think they would greatly benefit from an inviting intro like Chicago has. If that now has positive side effects for the site visibility, it becomes a more interesting task. That's all. JuliasTravels (talk) 12:42, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I did suggest this in passing above and do think it is a good idea. There does seem to be quite a few opponents, but I think that we just need to look at the bigger picture and the flow-on effects of such changes. An increase in viewership is significant for our site, considering that we are actually hovering quite low at the moment and concerns are being raised about whether anyone uses us at all. I don't think it can be said that the rewards would be limited. Not only will it improve readership, but also improve our general awareness and ability to provide the best quality travel guides. No use writing great guides if there's nobody here to see them... I say we trial it on one of the heavily-searched articles as mentioned above, and see how it goes. Maybe India, because then we can tie it into the Country Surgeon Expedition. Also, I don't think it's fair to say that our Star Articles are perfect and shouldn't be touched. As we recently discovered, some are actually in a fairly dismal state, such as Singapore until a recent renewal. JamesA ^>talk 13:29, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I suppose I didn't express my view particularly well in the post above. What I'm trying to say is that I don't think we should change articles for change's sake. If we can improve them, but with the side-effect of potentially higher search engine rankings then it's probably worthwhile. My point about limited rewards is not that doing this wouldn't ultimately pay off, it just would take a long time and a lot of editing to push the whole site rather than individual articles up the rankings. --Nick (talk) 18:01, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, maybe I didn't express my original question clear enough either then. We agree on change for change's sake, it's really rather about improving high-visibility areas that can benefit from attention, but perhaps wouldn't have been a priority if not for other side-effects. For the record though, I'm not sure you're last remark is entirely true. I think the whole rankings question is one that takes a long time, but I imagine highly popular articles should have a bigger impact also for the simple reason that they are way more likely to be linked to from other sites, no? And more links in turn would push up the site as a whole? (I'm asking - I'm not expert at all.) I'm not saying huge direct impact, but surely more than edits on small remote destinations, I guess. JuliasTravels (talk) 10:11, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I think we're both singing from a rather similar hymn sheet! Ultimately, more links would of course push WV up the rankings - it'll just take a lot of work! Improving high profile articles is always a good idea and it probably would have an impact over time - links are indeed very important! :) --Nick (talk) 23:36, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

jamguides.com redirection

For some time jamguides.com was used to hold a regularly-updated backup of the content from the old site. While I would like to get that site running again using the XML dumps for Wikivoyage, until that happens I've simply made the site redirect to Wikivoyage (as of 30 minutes ago), so http://jamguides.com/ redirects to http://www.wikivoyage.org, http://jamguides.com/travel/en/Chicago redirects to http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Chicago, etc. From what I've read I don't think this should be seen by Google as an attempt to game the system and thus hurt Wikivoyage, but if anyone has extensive experience with site redirects and knows otherwise please let me know and I'll remove the redirects. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:55, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

What happens with languages which have not yet been imported to Wikivoyage (Chinese, Hungarian, Romanian, Finnish)? K7L (talk) 17:23, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

All of the redirects are pattern-based so the redirect simply builds a replacement based on rules (grab the language and article name from the old URL and build a new URL) and then performs a redirect: http://jamguides.com/travel/fi/Helsinki redirects to http://fi.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Helsinki which in turn appears to redirect to http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wy/fi/Helsinki. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:31, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Very possible that articles which did exist before the site moved aren't in the incubator for these few languages. I recall it being a problem when dealing with templated WT links which are still spammed onto Wikipedia articles in these languages - until the content is imported, we have nowhere to which to redirect. K7L (talk) 17:42, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

I can guarantee that there will be some old jamguides.com links that now redirect to non-existent articles - I didn't try to add any intelligence into the redirects, I just wanted to try and have the majority of incoming links and spiders be redirected somewhere useful. The only concern is whether or not this type of redirecting would have any negative effect on Wikivoyage's SEO; I don't think it should, but posted here just in case I'm misreading currently-available SEO guidelines. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:43, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Strategy

We're a couple of months in since this particular expedition set out, but we've not seen a particularly dramatic (if any) improvement in affairs. Is there anything we can be doing and co-ordinating from here to improve our standing? --Nick (talk) 18:19, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Ditto! PrinceGloria (talk) 22:10, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

dmoz.org

Has anyone initiated any attempts to get Wikivoyage listed in Dmoz? Traditionally a dmoz listing has been an important step in improving Google rankings, although I'm not sure how true that is anymore. Looking at dmoz listings for the old site ([19]) it seems there are potentially a number of categories that Wikivoyage could be included in, although at a minimum we need a single listing as a travel wiki resource.

If someone has already investigated could you provide an update? And if not, is anyone willing to volunteer for the task of navigating the dmoz bureaucracy to get us listed? -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:43, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

I think we definitely need to navigate the bureaucracy and come to some kind of memorandum of understanding with the site owners whereby we are allowed to freely add our guides to the "Travel guides" section of places. Right now, it's a matter of individually writing a listing for EVERY destination, submitting it, and hoping someone keeps track of the category. Some categories haven't been updated or monitored for years. I think we deserve it, considering we give dmoz hundreds of links from our own site. If they refuse or aren't interested, I think we can simply remove their links from our site, as they don't really serve the traveller that well anyway.

As a short-term measure, I've submitted out site to the general Travel Guides category, along with Victoria (state) and Melbourne. I'll keep you posted on whether anything happens. JamesA ^>talk 10:29, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Many-to-one change on WT links?

Look at the history for any article we imported from WT during the move — that is, a large majority of articles on the site (though many have been improved here) including nearly all the articles for major tourist destinations. Each history here currently has the entire WT history, with a link to WT for every edit 2004 to late 2012, plus one link per edit to the editor's WT user page if any. For a popular article, that can be hundreds of links. Do search engines look at those? If so, we are giving WT tens of thousands of links to raise their rank. They, as a matter of policy, give us none at all.

Whether or not it affects SEO ranking, I'd like to see just two WT links per history. The oldest starting-point line in the file should be something like this:

This article was imported from the Wikitravel article (link to specific WT version) on (date). The history to that date, including author attributions, is at (another WT link).

As I see it, this is a useful cleanup step, making a clearer distinction between WV and WT edits and getting rid of a great deal of ancient history that the vast majority of readers will not care about anyway. The few who do care are likely to be exactly the ones most capable of following links and tracking down info on WT when required.

There are a number of problems with this proposal. First, it affects attribution and that is a legal obligation from the license, so we cannot even consider it seriously without comment from WMF lawyers. Second, it is a large task, obviously something that would require a bot. Finally, even assuming the lawyers say just linking to WT discharges our legal obligation to attribute, we cannot rely solely on those links. We'd need some sort of backup plan and backup data to ensure we could still attribute even if the WT site went away.

Comment, anyone? Pashley (talk) 21:06, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

For attribution purposes, and also to be able to trace article changes and development, my opinion is that we should 100% have full article history here. With regards to SEO impact, all article history pages are disallowed by http://en.wikivoyage.org/robots.txt per the "Disallow: /w/" rule, so they should have no impact on search rankings. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:16, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

WT loses 150,000 incoming links per month

Swept in from the pub

Quality backlinks is an important factor for search ranking. According to ahrefs.com, WT is losing about 150,000 backlinks per month:

March 1st: 3,974,000
April 1st: 3,775,000
May 1st: 3,667,000

I tried to access the stats for Wikivoyage, but was asked to register so I give up for now, if anyone has time I would be interested in the stats too, hoping we get tons of quality incoming links :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 09:43, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Our backlinks went way up in March, from 494k on 1 March to 683k on 1 April. But we were essentially flat for April due to a decreased number of new backlinks and a slightly increased number of lost backlinks. We're at 695k now. It'd be really nice if Google stopped hiding us. LtPowers (talk) 14:58, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Interesting comment

I found the comment posted here, that WT's demise is not going to be as swift as predicted, but in community at least we're excelling, quite interesting. We just need to up our popularity! --Nick ^talk 15:42, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Current task: Remove last remaining Wikitravel links

I'd like to remind everyone that there are only a handful of wikis left that still have used Wikitravel templates and deprecated [[wikitravel: ]] interwiki link code. I suggest users who want to help to start replacing usage of the remaining Wikitravel templates with a Wikivoyage template, linking to en: if there is none in the local language. The last interwiki links should also be removed, if replaced with a standard http: link if appropriate. There is quite a task ahead of us, as although the remaining wikis are few, their links number in the hundreds. See the Whatlinkshere of the Wikitravel template at the Malay, Hungarian, Finnish, Chinese and Romanian Wikipedias. JamesA ^>talk 10:08, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Is this project dying away?

Swept in from the pub

First, please take a look at this: [20]

Then, allow me to reflect that, when I joined the project quite some time after it's big launch, the number of active contributors stood at 533. I checked today and got the same number.

I went to [Wikivoyage:Search Expedition] and discovered that the policy seems to be to "wait for more and better content and only then promote". Specifically, I was worried seeing that articles that link to namesakes in Wikipedia are often not linked back. Then, I discovered that such automatic interwikilinking is not taking place because of the policy to only link to really good articles. That struck me, as Wikipedia links quite automatically to other language versions, even if the other language version of the article is still a stub. Perhaps there are policy differences that govern that, but I have already learned that in the wiki world, the policies are to be discussed, not treated as gospel.

I believe that with 533 editors and the daily amount of edits we have, it will take an infinite amount of time to bring Wikivoyage to a really high content standard, and a number of editors that low does not even guarantee basic maintenance of the content we already have (the world is changing rapidly, so information in many articles becomes outdated really quickly). If we are to wait with promoting the manure out of Wikivoyage to attract as many editors and gain critical mass until Wikivoyage becomes a place rife with quality content, we are in a vicious circle.

Edits at Wikivoyage talk:Search Expedition are sparse. Either everybody's working their buttocks off there with no time to talk, or perhaps rather simply there is not enough membership, enthusiasm and commitment to actively purse the cause. I guess the guys who volunteered for the project aren't really getting enough support. Perhaps there is something we could collectively do to help them move faster with the things. Perhaps everybody should consider themselves a member of this Expedition and ask to be assigned tasks.

At any rate, I believe Wikivoyage is a great project and I would so much like for it to succeed and become as natural for people to look up and participate in as Wikipedia. But, for now, I am feeling we are applying makeup to what slowly becomes a dead corpse. This Frankenstein's monster needs a big zap to come alive or else it decomposes on our tables.

What is it that is not happening but could? PrinceGloria (talk) 21:25, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

I am not certain what can be done other than trying to improve articles here, linking to them from elsewhere whenever it seems relevant, and suggesting to others that they contribute. Anything beyond that I'm content to leave to the Search Expedition. Presumably they'll let everyone know if they find something good that needs more people.

Anyway, the chart you show does not indicate the absence of a pulse. It shows fluctuations around .004% of web users visiting here with a fall in the last few days under .002. Worrying, perhaps, but not disastrous. It is too soon to tell if the recent drop is just another fluctuation or indicates some larger trend. Also, even .001% of a billion users is 10,000 users a day which is not entirely shabby. Pashley (talk) 21:55, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Progress has been slow, but we have hit a bit of a bottleneck with Google -- we don't show up in search results unless you specifically ask for "Wikivoyage". That's an indication that they see us as duplicate content. There are a number of efforts underway to try to fix that. For one, we're trying to get access to Google's (and Alexa's) webmaster tools, but it's tricky because WMF runs the servers. Barring that, we're hoping that as more people find Wikivoyage, Google will eventually realize that WT is an out-of-date archive copy of our content.

There has also been discussion about SEO techniques, but much of that is occurring "in the shadows" so to speak, so as not to tip off WT as to our plans (or to give them ideas).

I do have to question some of your premises, however. I'm not aware of any rule, either here or on Wikipedia, that suggests only the best Wikivoyage guides should be linked from Wikipedia. We would absolutely like to maximize the number of links from Wikipedia to Wikivoyage (without going overboard), but so far as I'm aware, the only thing holding us back is the effort needed to do so.

-- LtPowers (talk) 21:59, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Hopefully something like this would eventually be handled in Wikidata, but that's a long ways off. --Rschen7754 02:15, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage:Links_from_Wikipedia#When_to_link does mention that our guides must be usable or above to be linked to from Wikipedia. However, that has been, and should be taken with a grain of salt as the Wikipedia policy as far as I'm aware is to list any sister project if a respective article exists. Re: Search Expedition, things are moving slowly, but have not stalled; we should be prioritising a number of new initiatives and tasks in the coming weeks. JamesA ^>talk 02:35, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Am I the only one that enjoys WV lack of search engine popularity? I have no doubt that WV will eventually reach a critical mass and be the go-to guide for travelers, and when that time comes it will be awash with special interest groups and well funded and probably misguided attempts to alter pertinent data and we will be dealing with a whole other level of problems. How does the quote go? " First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -Mahatma Gandhi. WV is already the best travel guide for some areas, it is just a matter of time before everyone else catches on and I only hope that it does not lose something in the process. Lumpytrout (talk) 04:03, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Travel wiki is always a small wiki. WT has seen same or even lower level of activity, but it is recognized as a useful source of travel information, even though this information becomes outdated. I see no reason to worry, at least as long as this site has an active user community and sees new developments implemented (page banners are a very good example). The large number of links from Wikipedia may be good for search engines, but it is likely to annoy and upset new users, who will see Wikivoyage as a collection of stubs. This also relates to the policy/practice of keeping hundreds of empty and hopeless articles on less-known destinations. --Alexander (talk) 04:54, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

For comparison, we're what's considered a "medium-sized" wiki since we're not one of the ~600 WMF wikis that rely on m:global sysops and since we have >10 admins. All the other Wikivoyages are small wikis. --Rschen7754 05:10, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I'll second guess my instinct to not bother with this thread, just because the concern seems so frankly ridiculous. Having made this project a hobby and even a job at one time, checking in on a near daily basis for over 6 years, I can say with confidence that we have never before had such a vibrant community, more top-notch edits, more creativity and innovation, better content control, and just generally such a collective feeling of hope for a bright future.

Search engines are made by design to help users find the best information, so let's worry about creating and presenting it. We have some online travel titans out there to wrestle with (none of which start with the letter W), and I'm looking forward to the competition. --Peter ^Talk 06:31, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

As a side note, it's been pointed out to me that Wikitravel's getting overrun with spambots - meanwhile, we've only been getting 1-2 a day. [21] --Rschen7754 07:53, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for chiming in en masse, guys! The amount of people commenting in such a short time is one of the better proofs the project is still alive.

That said, I remain concerned. I fully accept that this is one of the more active MediaWiki projects, but still, I am comparing it to the other vibrant communities I have taken part in. For travel-related stuff, it is e.g. TripAdvisor, whose forums are bustling with content and which has recently added features very similar to Wikivoyage. Here, I could often use advice, assistance or put something up for discussion. Oftentimes, I find I am just talking to myself, as I am the only active contributor to the article! I feel that there is not enough editors, and not enough visitors for some of them to convert to editors.

As concerns issues resulting from the influx of "influencers" due to popularity, I would gladly accept them should they mean we become popular. Wikipedia is attacked every day from so many sides by every pressure group or plain vandal imaginable, and they are doing brilliantly with it. With a ratio of one admin per every ten users, we should be fine, and we can easily draw on the experience from Wikipedia. Even if WV got overrun by spambots and such, I truly believe admins and specialists from Wikipedia would be willing to help out seeing that this becomes an important MediaWiki project.

It is good to hear that there is more going on behind the scenes at the Search Expedition. To draw a constructive conclusion from the above musings - how about setting up a bot at WP that would automatically backlink Wikivoyage articles that link to WP? That would help tremendously, not least in the way that a Wikipedia editor seeing the link might go to WV and, seeing an underdevelop article, start contributing. What do you guys think? PrinceGloria (talk) 08:03, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

If the spam becomes really bad, we can always opt into becoming a global sysop wiki, and then we would get the assistance of stewards and global sysops (about 60), but they're of course spread across all the other WMF wikis. But I think we're doing fine as it is, especially since the stewards are good at globally blocking problematic ranges. As far as setting up a bot, just keep in mind that it will have to pass enwiki's bot approval process, which can be tedious.

A thought: will there ever be a Simple English Wikivoyage, or could the articles on Simple English Wikipedia link to here? --Rschen7754 09:20, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

There won't be a Simple English Wikivoyage any time soon, so it's perfectly okay to link to en:Wikivoyage. Currently, Simple Wikipedia links to en: sister projects apart from Wiktionary which also has a Simple version. JamesA ^>talk 09:27, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

If more moderation is needed, we can also increase the number of admins, before calling upon stewards to help more. I can think of several potential admins, for when we need more. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:41, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I am just going to chime in and say something if there is the Simple English Wikivoyage – if there was a wiki with that name, and if I was an admin there (like being one of the bosses to that wiki), I think that wiki should only articles about well-known travel guides (eg. Canada, it could be a beautiful place to visit in the snow for a holiday/vacation) with simple text. Also, like the other simple.wikis, 'pedia and 'ktionary, IPs should help improve and create pages and articles. And so on to the simple.wikis. curtaintoad | chat me! 10:06, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Well, the main issue with creating another wiki is that we already have 500 or so wikis that are only edited by spambots, so we would need to make sure that there's a demand for another one. The Simple English Wikiquote already closed, as did another Simple English wiki. And I am not sure that it is wise to spend resources on that when Wikivoyage isn't quite established yet. But you can always try starting one out at incubator.wikimedia.org if you want. (P.S. Admins aren't the "bosses" of anything; we don't get extra authority in content discussions). --Rschen7754 10:35, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Actually, a large percentage of Wikimedians are opposed to the "Simple English" projects. And, no, you can't start a test wiki on the Incubator in a "simple" language currently (cf. Requests for starting a test: Simple French Wikipedia, Simple world languages). It's not defined by ISO as a language. Langcom decided to allow new Simple projects, but is there a benefit to having more? PiRSquared17 (talk) 03:30, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Back to the bot thing - does anybody have the necessary skills and knowledge to set one up? I love debating, I have no reservations to substantiate the argument at en-wiki that we should run one. Anybody? No? Dust? PrinceGloria (talk) 09:47, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I think the bot could be counter-productive. Firstly, because it's highly unlikely to pass. But secondly, because it may spark a debate about how lenient Wikipedia is about allowing Wikivoyage links. They may turn around and decide that they shouldn't be linking to Wikivoyage off all 32,717 respective Wikipedia articles. If we were able to have a list of which WV-linked Wikipedia articles do not link back to us, it may help in a manual effort to increase linkage. JamesA ^>talk 10:15, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Using manual AWB may be an easier alternative. --Rschen7754 10:35, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

For the less literate - what is manual AWB and how can we start using it? Thanks! PrinceGloria (talk) 13:40, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

w:WP:AWB. LtPowers (talk) 14:53, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes. Unfortunately it's a Windows-only program, which is a bit annoying. You also need approval on the English Wikipedia to use it there, but approval is by the trustworthiness of the editor rather than related to the task. --Rschen7754 19:04, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I am editing from a Mac, bummer. At any rate, whenever you get the approval, do provide a link and a short tutorial - I will gladly launch a PC to help out.

Or does every editor using it require a permission? I used to be moderately active on en.Wikipedia, perhaps I left an impression good enough to pass. How do I get the approval? And how do I configure the AWB to do the task? PrinceGloria (talk) 19:40, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Every editor requires the permission. I personally use w:Boot Camp whenever I need to use AWB, since I get Windows free from my university. The approval page is linked off the link above. --Rschen7754 01:25, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

I've got AWB and have used it in the past. But just to be clear, what list are we generating? I understand we want a list of Wikipedia articles that are linked to from Wikivoyage but do not yet have a Wikivoyage template. But is obtaining such a list even possible? If so, please explain =) JamesA ^>talk 09:51, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

It will probably take some creativity to generate the lists - maybe going through categories of cities and checking for a Wikivoyage template, for example, and then adding the template and the proper article name. --Rschen7754 05:16, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Note that Wikidata will soon allow linking between Wikipedia and Wikivoyage, so perhaps this isn't necessary yet. --Rschen7754 10:25, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Capitalizing on the forthcoming launch of a new logo

Why no Capitalize on the launch of a new logo and have a banner campaign at Wikipedia, similar to that when this site was first launched? I imagine such a banner to state something along the lines of "Wikivoyage has launched a new image" 81.178.172.94 23:48, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

I am sure it will get mention in the signpost. Greater coverage would be good but getting consensus may be an issue. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:51, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

Better text for Wikivoyage template at Wikipedia

I was a bit shocked to read at PageRank:

"Current PageRank (0 to 10, higher is best):

• For the Paris article: Wikivoyage 3/10, Wikitravel 6/10"

It does not matter what the so-called "PageRank" of our Paris article is (or what any other of our articles is).

What matters is whether our article appears in the first 2 or 3 organic search results on relevant searches (and, for those with a competitive streak, whether it appears above or below a WT entry). Google continuously changes its algorithms and there is now only a very tenuous link between so-called PR and search results.

We can not directly change some of our on-page factors but one thing we can do is make sure that the templated inbound links to us at the foot of a Wikipedia article are as attractive a spur to action as possible to most people who might spot them.

Please edit the text of the Wikivoyage template at Wikipedia so that instead of, the bureaucratic sounding message of the first box,

it has the more attractive and relevant message of the second box.

Fortuitously, this will also mean that the more popular search term of guide will appear next to the anchor text.
(Few people include information or related (or synonyms) in their search terms as http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=travel%20guide%20to%20paris&cmpt=q indicates!) --W. Frank^email_talk 15:32, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

It's probably worth posting here about this as well. We really do need to increase our popularity in as many ways as we can. --Nick ^talk 16:17, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

I think it is better that you do that, Nick, I think you have a registered Wikipedia account? This is for at least two reasons. The first is that I am not a native English speaker and your use of language is likely to be far more punchy, persuasive and lyrical than mine (as you've recently been demonstrating on our Manchester article). The second, I think you can guess.

If there is no opposition, you can then make the edit to the relevant template directly - it's very easy to do. --W. Frank^email_talk 17:05, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Ok, happy to do so! I'll wait and see if anyone else posts here with any more ideas or thoughts but, if not, I'll suggest it there later on this evening. (Thanks for the Manchester comments - you're very kind! :) ) --Nick ^talk 17:22, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

I like the new link for destination articles, but I would like to see an alternative to use when linking to travel topics, itineraries etc. For example see the WP article Ferry which has a link to Boat Travel. Would it be possible to either allow alternative text with a field or create a second template? AlasdairW (talk) 19:56, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Please bear in mind that I am not using the actual Wikipedia templates here but rather facsimiles of them, but the actual Wikipedia template allows for a title of choice to display for the link to the actual article, so in your example, you might want to use something like this piped text. --W. Frank^email_talk 20:56, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

I think the colon should be removed and a full stop added to the end of the sentence. Nurg (talk) 03:47, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

I agree with colon removal and I'm agnostic about a final full stop. (Let's hope it can be done on the NHS). --W. Frank^email_talk 11:42, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

The punctuation has now been done, following Template:Commons. Nurg (talk) 20:49, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Suggested here. Would 'guide to' rather than 'for' sound better? --Nick ^talk 12:16, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Probably - but it's ever so slightly less appropriate for some of the stranger titles of a minority of our articles, Nick. --W. Frank^email_talk 13:06, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Fair enough! :) --Nick ^talk 13:40, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

I support the proposal to change "travel information related to" to "a travel guide for". And we appear to have a consensus to proceed. Nurg (talk) 21:01, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

• Support for the change of wording to "a travel guide for". Danapit (talk) 08:14, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

• I may be mistaken, but I think the original wording was to account for situations where we have a page that isn't actually a travel guide... or the linked travel guide does not have a one-to-one correspondence with the Wikipedia article. For example, w:Japanese language now has a box that says "Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Japanese phrasebook." Maybe we need more switches on the template? LtPowers (talk) 13:01, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Action points to boost our readership

The number one strategic task for the English Wikivoyage is to increase our readership. We've done some great work - assisted by our German Wikivoyage colleagues - with introducing dynamic maps and folks are furiously sharpening up the prose of our articles and keeping them up to date, but all this is somewhat in vain if nobody can find us in the search engines.

It's easy enough to get our new articles (such as Nelson (England) and Choum - that have no equivalent at Wikitravel) to appear in the top 3 search engine results.

I have now started an experiment to empirically discover what tactics we can use to make our legacy articles appear in the top 3 search engine results too.

On the same day, 12 September 2013, Somerset, Tasmania was created from scratch here at Wikivoyage and "Somerset (Tasmania) was created at Wikitravel. (I've deliberately not given the Wikitravel version a free hyperlink here, but I'm sure you'll find it over there).

In the Somerset, Tasmania article, I've deliberately practised some of what I preach below - for example, using a different lede for at least the first couple of sentences. I've also been much more radical by NOT using our "traditional" section headings that were inherited from Wikitravel and I'd make a heartfelt plea for nobody to change these if my experiment is to have any validity.

One reason I chose Somerset, Tasmania for my little experiment is that it was very unusual in not having a Wikipedia result on the first page when I searched from google.com, co.uk, ca,

Unfortunately, just two days after I created our Somerset, Tasmania article and linked from it to Wikipedia, our "big brother" is now showing up on the first page (and, at least from Glasgow IP's, Wikivoyage is too. Wikitravel article does not show up in searches from Glasgow yet).

Here are my suggestions:

1) Don't believe all the yarns that Google spins about "no-follow".

A significant self-help move we can make is to stop signalling to their robots that we are only an inferior derivative work every time they spider us. We should immediately junk the two free hyperlinks of relevant anchor text we give those nice, friendly folk at InternetBrands on the vast majority of our article pages (and on their associated discussion pages). We should immediately replace this kind of hyperlinked text

"This article is derived from the article Dresden on wikitravel.org/en in its revision as of 08:30, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

with this minimally compliant but legal attribution:

"This article is derived from the Dresden article on wikitravel.org/en in its revision as of 08:30, 6 July 2012 (UTC).

There was (and is) absolutely nothing in Wikitravel's licensing regime that mandated hyperlinking when giving attribution!

Doc James wrote on Wikimedia that "...since we have moved over the entire history of edits attribution is given... We probably do not need to mention WT at all."

Stefan2 pointed out: "If you download a PDF version ("Print/export": "Download as PDF" in the menu to the left), then Wikitravel isn't mentioned at all. Is this an error? If a clickable link is required, then I'm a bit troubled about Wikivoyage:Offline reader Expedition as you can't include a clickable link in a paper copy of Wikivoyage."

There are some technical tricks that our webmasters can do to mitigate our Google duplicate penalty (and I'm certainly not going to even outline them here in plain text - if anyone is interested they can phone, and those are, presumably the subject of the rather woolly bugzilla report) but there are also three more things that we can do to help ourselves IMMEDIATELY and I have seen no cogent opposition to:

2) Delete the literally thousands of "outline" articles that consist of only an opening "lede paragraph" in the form "x is a city/region in y" and a skeleton of (empty) standard sections. (Oh, I forgot, now thanks to the bot brigade these mostly now have a fine new banner and a link to a relevant Wikipedia article). We are not a Gazetteer and getting rid of roughly 20% of our articles and starting them again (as and when there is someone to take an interest in developing them properly), without duplicate text and the WV attribution to completely non-useful content, would go a long way towards signalling that we are a different (rather than a derivative) site.

In it:voy they deleted long ago all the skeleton articles (more than a thousand). Now (apart from a few hidden exceptions that may still exists) they only have articles with a minimum amount of useful information, and it's not allowed to create skeleton articles.

Indeed, Andyrom75 wrote at Wikimedia: "Now regarding the ranking I have the opposite problem, in some cases google is indexing also the page that I haven't created yet, but just mentioning (with a red link) in existing article. I've noticed that this cases are the ones where an article with that name exist in en:w but not in it:w. It could be good to develope those articles but I can't do all at once... :-( "

3) Change our ledes. Start with the 200+ country articles and high visibility articles like Paris, etc. I think most of us here at this specialised expedition already know that 95% of searchers don't go past the first 3 results. I think you also know that the results for "travemunde travel guide" and "mitzpe ramon travel guide" search terms will vary according to your IP, time of day, google domain and server that you are using, search history and other variables. That said, although the WT articles always appeared higher up the search result page by more than 4 places when I tried some tests, they did do much better than most WV "legacy attributed and hyperlinked articles" and I think I know the reason. In both cases, they are currently wearing Star nomination templates which changes the lede substantially as far as the Google spider is concerned. This gives the clue to another thing we should think about doing: try and drop the formulaic "x is a city in y" introductions in most ledes which almost always duplicates the WT intro.

4) Change all our "traditional" standard section titles. The "old guard" need to decide what they value most - tradition or a large and growing readership.

In many browsers, you can see the HTML that search engine spiders will see by pressing [CTRL] and [U]. Neither WT nor us have optimised our H1 tags and, right now, the important H2 tags signal that we are a mirror (and a cracked one at that) of WT. --W. Frank^email_talk 20:34, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

I may be horribly out-of-date, since the last time I looked at search engine optimisation (SEO) methods was in the late 90s, but my understanding is that adding keyword= tags should be the first thing anyone does in SEO. Trying ctrl-U (thanks, Frank; I did not know about that) on our Yangshou page, I see no keywords. This strikes me as a blunder which should be fixed, pronto.

Comparing to the WT page, I see they have both a keywords= line and a description= line which repeats most of the keywords. It seems possible to me that this alone might account for the differences in search rank.

We need to be a bit cautious about this. My understanding is that Google penalises sites that put in too many keywords in transparent attempts to cheat on search rank. Someone whose knowledge is better & more current than mine should make those decisions. However, unless my info here is utterly out-of-date, adding some keywords should be a top priority task. Pashley (talk) 21:33, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Doing a Google search for "basic SEO" and looking at the first two sites — 7 Basic SEO Techniques All Webmasters Must Know and 10 Basic SEO Tips To Get You Started — I find both put a heavy emphasis on keyword tags. Pashley (talk) 21:44, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

(Edit conflicts) http://www.homestead.com/blog/05/2013/7-basic-seo-techniques-all-webmasters-must-know#.UjTaRH85zAU isn't wrong, but the other site makes me weep at it's out of date naivety.

searchenginewatch.com has newsletters you can subscribe to if you wish to keep up to date with empirical research.

No harm in having a better description tag, but keywords have been pretty well ignored by most search engines since the last century. The four low hanging fruit are enumerated above (now in order of importance). I do have four fusion weapons up my sleeve, but I'm not going to explain their use to anyone that hasn't signed a confidentiality agreement since they are commercial secrets. Phone or e-mail if you're interested. --W. Frank^email_talk 21:50, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

I've been deleting "Related pages" sidebar links some new users have been inserting, which tend to cover destinations already up the breadcrumb trail for articles and such. Should these links continue to be omitted from the sidebar, with the "Related pages" tab reserved for sister-site links (Wikipedia, Commons, DMOZ)? Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:47, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

"Related pages" and "Related sites" are different. The former seems appropriate for the intra-Wikivoyage links, while "Related sites" is for Wikipedia/Commons. Melbourne is an example. -- torty3 (talk) 06:44, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Torty3. However, that link (to UNESCO Creative Cities) is to a related category, not to a page that's already up the breadcrumb trail. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:01, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for putting so much thought into this Frank! This is a really important issue for WV and something that we need to resolve ASAP.

Firstly, it would be interesting to know just how we would be able to change the keyword tags on here and how much emphasis Google places upon them. From what I gather, as has been said above, sites that overuse such tags are penalised. Do we know if WP uses such tags and whether the WMF has a policy them? If they are permitted and an appropriate number easily judged, it would be good to have them implemented soon.

As for the other points raised, I completely agree that our attribution to WT should be changed, although it will have to go through the WMF, so could take some time. Do we know if the WMF is yet considering such a change?

As I wrote in the pub, I would also be keen to see our lead paragraphs re-invigorated; if this come with an SEO benefit then this is definitely something to encourage.

Your other two suggestions (delete skeletons and change section names) are a little more radical and would worry me a little if implemented immediately. I would prefer to see keywords and a programme of introduction revitalisation implemented before we head down those avenues. If neither keywords or new leads have an impact, we could then consider stronger action. --Nick ^talk 21:59, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Nick - keywords should be irrelevant, see [22] (directly from Google). My knowledge of SEO is pretty good but not at top levels as I'm not directly responsible for SEO in my day job, but I work with people who are and have to keep it in mind in everything I do as a web developer. Here are some thoughts in no particular order:

1. I remain of the opinion that the biggest issues working against us are that our articles need to develop further so that our content is significantly different from WT, and that our site simply needs to be online longer as Google gives weight to a site's age. Google views us as a mirror of WT because the content is significantly similar, they've been around longer, and their pages historically rank higher.
2. A HUGE factor in some of the weightings is that WT has the word "travel" in their URL, and Google gives massive weighting to domain name. Do a search for a city name + "voyage" and we'll almost always be ranked higher. Overcoming that disadvantage is simply a matter of building up our ranking.
3. Removing the WT links (and ideally text) in the footer should also help, but until legal gives an OK that's not something that can happen.
4. I also believe that changing content solely for SEO reasons is the wrong way to go. Let's change content to make it better, and SEO will follow.
5. For basic SEO, the Mediawiki software automatically does most of what the SEO guides recommend - redirects, canonical tags, etc are all handled by the software.
6. If there are simple ways to increase our incoming links that would be an easy way to increase page rank, although I think we've gotten most of the low-hanging fruit. If people have their own blogs or sites, remembering to link to Wikivoyage when appropriate is important.

-- Ryan • (talk) • 22:37, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

As far as I can tell this initiative is broadly technical in nature and seems concerned about how to improve the competitiveness of WV in search engines. This is all good although it mostly applies to a subset of 'power users' on WV who can discuss and action changes across the site.

Can we provide a shorter list of guidelines that 'standard' contributors can take that will improves the visibility of individual pages that they work on? I recently created an individual page Haeundae that does not exist on WT, and it has a Google ranking of 18. Not bad for a start, however would like to know how to improve... --Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:26, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Somerset, Tasmania update

Interesting news: Just 10 days after similarly named destination articles were created from scratch both here and over at Wikitravel, our article now always appears on the first page of Google's organic results for permutations of these common search terms "somerset tasmania guide" and always tops Wikitravel in the results. (Expedia still usually beats us).

I've used 12 different Glasgow IP's today to search various national Google domains and (except for Israel), results seem surprisingly regular. I'd welcome reports on my User talk page of any of your local search results using the search terms: "somerset tasmania guide", or permutations.

Obviously, I've only used two of my 4 "action points above ("Change our ledes" and "Change all our "traditional" standard section titles" so that they are not an identical mirror of Wikitravel) but I've also used some other subtle changes from our current MoS, such as Units.

Just as interesting to me - and a clear empirical rebuttal to Google's propaganda about "just write better and more useful text if you wish to rank better" - is that I have deliberately ensured that my experimental guide here is actually slightly weaker in terms of "hard content" - eg: it only has one "Dine" listing, whereas WT's has nine. --W. Frank^email_talk 15:27, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Did you note the relative rankings before you made your change, by any chance? --Inas (talk) 03:14, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm convinced there is something very odd going on with this. The WT article, has a very low ranking. Interestingly, on Bing, it doesn't even appear in the search results (and neither does WV). However, I think the results speak in favour of a broader experiment, and we should give a similar work over to a prime time article that we know rates lower. --Inas (talk) 03:15, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

It's interesting that the WV article ranks higher in this case where the two articles were created around the same time. I agree with Inas that an experiment on a prime time article would be good. The chosen article should be one that has the same content on both WT and WV though -- based on the Somerset example, I can't determine if the headings and lede made a difference or if it's because most of the content is different. My own experience from re-writing a couple of ledes is that it doesn't help in the search results if that's the only difference in the articles. -Shaundd (talk) 08:02, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Shaun's right: I've done a lot of work to our Manchester article, but it still fails to appear in the first pages of results. Would it be worth thinking about what the new headings might be if we were to change them? --Nick ^talk 16:19, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I created a new Picton (New South Wales) article, and the content is pretty ordinary. The article now rates 3rd on Google for me, above much better travel guides for the same town. There was no corresponding article on WT. So, there is some google juice flowing our way, and it really does seem to be just the existence of an earlier, similar WT article that has such a dramatic effect. --Inas (talk) 04:30, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

If I type the WT Somerset article URL directly into Google it is not finding the page, which suggests to me that it is not yet in Google's index. If that is the case we need to wait longer before any conclusions can be drawn. -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:17, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Typing the WT Somerset article URL into Google is now returning the relevant WT article, so I would suspect it may have just been crawled by Google. We might want to give it a few more days and then revisit the ranking as compared to WV in order to get any sort of accurate information about whether one site's article outranks or replaces the other. -- Ryan • (talk) • 00:03, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Inas: You wrote "Did you note the relative rankings before you made your change, by any chance?". There were no relative rankings "before change". Both articles were created from scratch on the same day.

It is vital if we are to overcome Google's current site assessment (that in all cases where there are two articles with the same or similar names, the Wikivoyage article should be regarded as an (inferior and inaccurate) mirror of the WT article in organic search results) that all 4 changes proposed above should be made at the same time and not sequentially over a period of weeks. To the original 4 action points, I would add a fifth: Change the naming scheme to that used by Wikipedia eg use Somerset, Tasmania rather than Somerset (Tasmania).

Action plan should, therefore, be:

1) Obtain permission from WMF legal for removal of hyperlinked attribution (to be replaced with human readable minimally compliant attribution - a link to our own imported article history page(s) may be sufficient)

2) Get timetable from technical for this site-wide change: "A-Day"

3) Change article names where necessary as close as possible to "A-Day" - use bot to replace incidences of parentheses?

4) Decide on alternative section titles so they are not the same "legacy" section titles of "Sleep", "Eat", etc as used by Wikitravel. Use bot to change all section titles (except "Go next" and "Contact") as close as possible to "A-Day".

5) Start the long process of changing all our ledes so they don't use the same boring formula as WT. This will take a long time, but start with our most popular articles and include 200+ country articles as priorities. --W. Frank^email_talk 13:57, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

There is no evidence that this will work. The testing you've done on a new single article doesn't really support the strategy/plan. --Inas (talk) 21:08, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

It works for this article. I agree that it is not the best example though as it is not an article that existed previously on both WT and WV. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:10, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't know why we would choose a new article to demonstrate a concept we want to apply to existing articles. I've worked with a existing articles. Yowah I deleted and recreated, because it was 100% written by me. No effect. Broome I've changed the headers, no effect. Before we go and make extensive changes, we need to point to a single existing article on both WT and WV that has been increased in google rank by any of these factors. I'm not aware of any, but lets keep working at it. --Inas (talk) 23:18, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Agree with Inas. It's a good result that the WV Somerset page is well-ranked, but the test is not all that relevant for our 20,000+ existing articles. Not only are the lede and section headings different between the WV and WT articles and there's no need for links back to a WT page, the content in the individual sections is different. Ryan indicated above that different page content is very important to Google search results and that's consistent with the limited stuff I've read about SEO. If this SEO stuff is as simple as changing headers, page names and ledes, that's great, but let's do some more due diligence to see if changing headings, page names, etc really makes a difference. A number of the changes Frank proposes will be contentious and not worth making (IMO) if they don't help out SEO-wise. -Shaundd (talk) 23:44, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree -- I think changing headers and switching to using long-form article names are both things I would definitely like to avoid at all costs unless it can be proven without a shadow of a doubt that they will substantially boost SEO in a way that absolutely nothing else will. Texugo (talk) 00:50, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Exactly, we need definitive proof before making any wide ranking changes. And definitive proof that we can all recreat. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:13, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

• 40 DAY UPDATE: I've heard today that it's likely I won't be editing Wikivoyage for quite a few weeks, so I'd like to leave you (what I regard as) the final result of my Somerset, Tasmania experiment.

In the organic search results my article (with sub-section titles experimentally altered from our standard ones and a lede that avoids the formulaic "A is a city in B", and, vitally important, no hyperlinks or other clues signalling it is a sub-standard mirror of Wikitravel) now consistently outranks Expedia, Wikipedia and Wikitravel for the search term I was testing: "guide somerset tasmania" and, in so far as I can test things here in Glasgow always appears in the first three organic (ie not paid for advertisement/results) results positions, usually in first place. (The one exception, of course, is Australian Google if you ask it to prioritise results from Australian websites.)

Since the demise of Scroogle, it has been awkward to get anonymised, non-personalised results out of Google. Here is one website that helps with the US site: https://startpage.com

This tool will give you search results from Google websites in the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland, UK, Germany, etc, (and more, if customised) if you use Firefox as your browser - but beware, it is not anonymised as effectively as the first tool: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-global/

Now, I appreciate that some of you may loathe and detest me (and have consistently libelled me as a fraud, liar and a cheat), but let me "put my money where my mouth is". I am so confident that, if you, adopt my five point plan below to boost our readership, I will absent myself for six months if it fails to lift our readership by 400% in the first 2 months of implementation (and one whole year if it fails to lift our readership by 200% in the first 2 months of implementation):

Action plan for a %400 uplift:

1) Obtain permission from WMF legal for removal of hyperlinked attribution (to be replaced with human readable minimally compliant attribution - a link to our own imported article history page(s) may be sufficient)

2) Get timetable from technical for this site-wide change: "A-Day"

3) Change article names where necessary as close as possible to "A-Day" - use bot to replace incidences of parentheses?

4) Decide on alternative section titles so they are not the same "legacy" section titles of "Sleep", "Eat", etc as used by Wikitravel. Use bot to change all section titles (except "Go next" and "Contact") as close as possible to "A-Day".

5) Start the long process of changing all our ledes so they don't use the same boring formula as WT. This will take a long time, but start with our most popular articles and include 200+ country articles as priorities.

I must stress the necessity for ALL these changes to be carried out simultaneously to send the strongest possible signal to Google that this is a site with new content and not a gradually improving (but still inferior) mirror of Wikitavel.

If you find someone willing e-mail me in confidence about implementing some subtle changes to some of our hard coded HTML tags and meta-tags I can promise a further lift of 400-2000% uplift in search engine directed traffic - however, the in-article changes must be done first and before the behind-the-scene changes. --W. Frank^email_talk 16:37, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

I have said it before, and I'll say it again. This experiment has too many variables to know what elements are doing the trick. I want to see the elements tested separately and in various combinations, because if there is not black and white evidence that changing section headers and/or article titles are undoubtedly responsible for an improvement, I do not want to go there. Texugo (talk) 18:52, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Oh ye of little faith. How many times do I have to say this? My proposals are a package - none of them will work separately or in isolation to the extent necessary. Let me paint an analogy. If I tell you that you will get at least 40 miles per gallon out of an ancient Ford Fiesta if you do all 5 of:

1) adjust the brakes so they do not bind

2) inflate the tyres from 1 pound per square inch to 35

3) put 4 spark plugs in each of the vacant spark plug holes

4)connect all 4 high tension leads to each appropriate spark plug

5)remove the rusty water in the fuel tank, clean the fuel tank out properly, dry it and then fill it with clean petrol

Why ever would you think you can do just one (or even three) of these excellent suggestions and still get a result. Please specify exactly what you think you have to lose. You've wasted nearly a year now of doing things your way and its obvious to any human intelligence that we are the better site. The problem is that there is no human "Site quality evaluation department" at Google. Why ever would you not want four times the readership each day and every day? --W. Frank^email_talk 19:17, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Luckily, unlike in your analogy, testing each of the 5 points here in isolation and/or various combinations is not going to strand anyone on the side of the road. If we do find that taking all your suggestions together is the only way it will work, I won't stand in the way of bringing greater readership. But I'm not willing to support massive sitewide changes based on just your word and a single trial with a jumble of variables. We need a more scientific set of trials before we decide which direction to go. Texugo (talk) 19:46, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

What exactly do you think you have to lose?

You can only do this once and simultaneously. Do it partially or in a half-arsed way and the chance is gone for ever.

"A-Day" is a bit like D-day. It relies on an overwhelming and (for the robotic Google spiders) an overwhelming and surprising radical change. You can not practice or test it. Right now my test article is the highest ranking of any of our articles. Better than USA for "guide usa" better than Paris for "guide paris france". Better than any other of our thousands of articles. You can't get better than the number one search listing position in Google. --W. Frank^email_talk 20:22, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

"What exactly do you think you have to lose?" I could say the same exact thing to you. What do you think you have to lose by letting other users test your strategy before implementing massive site-wide changes that will take a lot of hard work to implement? Let other users try out these strategies in different combinations, see what results they get, see if they match your claims, and then we go from there. Isn't that the scientific method at work? If you have such confidence in your strategy, why not let others test it themselves? PerryPlanet (talk) 23:41, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Broome experiment

Okay, I'm going to have a go at Broome. Currently, WT rates 3rd, another couple of travel guides above it. I've been through the first 20 pages of results, and there is no mention of WV. So it looks like a good target to me. --Inas (talk) 04:33, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Yesterday I changed the headings. Today, WT rates 4th. WV article still nowhere to be seen. Not even in the search results. --Inas (talk) 00:23, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Changing only one factor out of 5 will have little discernible effect. For the best effect, all 5 need to be changed on the same date. --W. Frank^email_talk 13:57, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Although I'm happy to support experiments based on any hypothesis, there is currently no evidence to support that the timing of the changes matters, or indeed that the changes themselves matter. So, I'm happy to continue with this experiment as is. --Inas (talk) 00:48, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I will give an article a try. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:24, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

It appears to work. Took 8 days. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:42, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Stopped working today, both times searches were done while logged out. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 10:04, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Article move experiment

Might I suggest that we also give moving articles a go? Both Bolton and Manchester/Castlefield - Petersfield have been moved by me, and both now rank on the first page of Google results. Perhaps a good test subject would be Birmingham (England), which we could move to Birmingham, England? --Nick ^talk 00:37, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

First under what search term? Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:26, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

They rank on the first page under "bolton travel guide", "castlefield travel guide", "manchester castlefield travel guide" and the district is the first result for "manchester petersfield travel guide". --Nick ^talk 07:41, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

What did they rank before the move? Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:45, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Checking an article with ctrl-U to look at HTML, I see: <title>Xiamen – Travel guides at Wikivoyage</title>. My guess is that a small change in the scripts that turn wikitext into HTML could make that <title>Xiamen travel guide at Wikivoyage</title>, or just <title>Xiamen travel guide</title> since the site name is given elsewhere, and that would improve search results. Pashley (talk) 11:46, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Google seems to totally ignore commas and parentheses in search, though. Odd it would pay attention to them in titles. --Inas (talk) 22:09, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Does it ignore the 's' in a plural form? Or presence of an exact phrase? If a user searches for "Xiamen travel guide", as seems likely, will my suggested "Xiamen travel guide at ..." be better than the current "Xiamen - Travel guides at ..."? Pashley (talk) 19:38, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

I just did a search for "Moss Beach travel guide" and "Moss Beach travel guides", and to my surprise the plural form showed up on the second page of Google results while the singular form didn't show up in the first three pages of results. We have control over the content of the title tag (MediaWiki:Pagetitle) so I'd suggest changing the current "$1 – Travel guides at Wikivoyage" to something like "$1 - Travel guide at Wikivoyage" or "$1 travel guide - Wikivoyage" (note: the second title duplicates WT and might cause duplicate content issues). Anyone have any thoughts or other suggestions? -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:07, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea; well worth testing out! We could try '$1 - Wikivoyage travel guide'? --Nick ^talk 18:18, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

With the caveat that in my day job I'm involved mainly involved in SEO decisions that are unrelated to specific keyword choices, my understanding is that the page title is very important and it would be better to use something that is closer to the actual search term, so "$1 - Travel guide at Wikivoyage" would be better than "$1 - Wikivoyage travel guide" since a user would be more likely to search for "$1 travel" or "$1 travel guide". If that understanding is wrong then hopefully someone else can correct me. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:37, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Is the title text customizable per namespace? Powers ^(talk) 20:20, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

As far as I know it is not customizable per namespace, but I haven't done any research on the matter (the current title of this page is "Wikivoyage talk:Search Expedition (section) – Travel guides at Wikivoyage"). Did you want to propose an alternate text that would be more generic across namespaces? The danger of that approach is that the title tag is our most valuable SEO tag, so it should really include the words "travel guide" in some way, even if that means that non-mainspace articles will have slightly misleading titles. -- Ryan • (talk) • 06:14, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

No, I think you might be reading too much into my innocuous question. =) I mainly asked because I believe we had such a setup at WT, in which "travel guide" was only appended to mainspace article titles. (Looking now, I see they also managed to avoid appending "travel guide" to travel topics and phrasebooks, while maintaining it for itineraries and destination guides, even though they're all in the mainspace!) I would like to see us find a phrasing that doesn't look like we're copying WT, if possible. Maybe "Wikivoyage - Free $1 travel guide" or something like that? Powers ^(talk) 16:41, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

I'll leave it to others to figure out if we can change things per-namespace (I thought WT did it with custom RDF that Evan wrote, but could be wrong). With regards to the title text, for SEO purposes it is important to have the most important terms on the left (among many others, see [23]), so "Wikivoyage" really should be at the end since it's our least important search term. While using the same title as WT would be unfortunate, the article name ("Chicago", "Asia", etc) really does need to be first since it's the most critical and descriptive term, and "travel guide" should also feature prominently unless there is another set of terms that we feel are important. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:03, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Since there isn't objection to changing the title I've changed it to the singular "$1 - Travel guide at Wikivoyage" while we try to figure out if something else would be better. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:32, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Excellent decision! --118.93nzp (talk) 19:46, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Could we change the page description of the Main Page as well? I just noticed that it doesn't contain the words 'travel guide'.... --Nick ^talk 01:19, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Another page title update

Given that minor tweaks to page titles can make a big difference to how a page is ranked in search results I've changed the page title pattern from "$1 – Travel guide at Wikivoyage" to "$1 travel guide - Wikivoyage". The downside of this change is that the pattern is now the same as WT and it is not ideal for non-travel pages (like user pages), the upside is that it makes "PAGENAME travel" and "PAGENAME travel guide" more exact search matches. If there is objection I would ask that we try out the new pattern for a couple of weeks just to see if it makes any difference before the change is reverted. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:23, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Would changing the names like London (Ontario) to match what WP & Commons use, e.g. w:London, Ontario, have a useful effect? I think we should do it anyway & there has been some discussion somewhere, but I cannot find it now. Pashley (talk) 02:48, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

From an SEO standpoint anything that can be done to make Wikivoyage content different from other sites would be valuable, and page URL is one of the most critical ranking factors for a search engine. That said, renaming a lot of pages would be a huge job, so I'd suggest soliciting support for a very controlled test on perhaps 10-20 pages, making sure nothing changes during the test period but the page URL, and seeing if there is a noticeable change in search result rankings. Depending on the result a broader change would be worth considering. -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:02, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

I've reverted the pattern back to "$1 – Travel guide at Wikivoyage" as I'm not seeing any change in the ranking of articles I monitor, so if there was any benefit it seems to be either very small or else offset by the fact that the page title was adding to our duplicate content penalty. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:34, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

How to reuse WV content

Another way to get links and eyes on to our content, is to encourage additional reuse. The screen scraping required, and risk of being blocked for copying data is a big problem at WT. Here, we have full db dumps. I think a good page on how to reuse our content, the link back that we would like for attribution could encourage other sites to use WV info. I might start work on a How to reuse WV content guide. --Inas (talk) 23:48, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Excellent point, Inas. Go for it! --W. Frank^email_talk 23:57, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

We already have Wikivoyage:How to re-use Wikivoyage guides. That may need improvement or better links — main page? welcome, business owners? redirects? elsewhere? — or it might need to be advertised outside WV, but we do not need another page. Pashley (talk) 02:25, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Yep. I'm happy to start there. --Inas (talk) 06:49, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I've had a first pass. Feel free to join in. I think we rank #1 in google rank for a search on "reusing free travel guide". The word reuse is awkward. --Inas (talk) 05:39, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Questions

Wikivoyage:Travellers'_pub#Hiding_the_page_titles_in_the_main_namespace has people congratulating themselves for getting rid of titles. Checking a random page with ctrl-U, I find we no longer have a <title> tag. I suspect that is a bad idea in terms of SEO — I want to keep it and add <keywords> and <description> tags — but am asking here so people who know more of SEO can comment.

I also notice that there is much javascript involved. How does that work for spiders that presumably do not interpret scripts, or for people that disable javascript for security reasons? (I do for most sites, but have WV whitelisted.) Could we get rid of some scripts without either doing unacceptable damage to functionality or overloading the servers by making them do work that is currently farmed out to client machines? Pashley (talk) 17:34, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

The <title> tag is still there on pages that have page banners, although you're right that the <h1> that displays the page title is being hidden by Javascript. Some refactoring of Template:Pagebanner is probably in order to get rid of the current DISPLAYTITLE mess, although it's not obvious to me that this issue would hurt our SEO - it doesn't help, and the page banner should probably be modified to use an <h1> for the page title, but I don't think we're committing any major SEO sins with the current approach. As to the use of Javascript, what we're doing is fairly benign and is required to overcome deficiencies in the Mediawiki software when it comes to suppressing page titles. I can make an attempt to address some of these concerns later today if there are no objections. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:50, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

It's much better from an SEO perspective to have relevant text between the <h1> opening and closing tags. --W. Frank^email_talk 19:54, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Template:Pagebanner has been updated to remove the DISLAYTITLE bits (which cleans up the CSS around the title tag) and some unnecessary bolding. It is not possible to change the title in the page banner to a heading tag without having it show up in the TOC, so I left that part alone. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:21, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Review of articles with significant changes

In light of the discussion above, I think it would be good if we reviewed pages that have undergone significant changes in the past few months and see how they appear in Google search results. I'm assuming that all WV pages started off in the nether regions of Google's search results (which may not be entirely true, but it was my experience that Feb/March I couldn't find any of our pages in search results where I typed "PLACENAME travel guide"). The list below is articles I've worked on plus other guides that I'm aware have been significantly changed in the past few months. If you're know of any others, please add them below and let's see if we can find any patterns.

• Buffalo - guide that has been districtified. Substantial changes to Districts, See, Do, Eat, Drink and Sleep but much of the original text remains in other sections. Result - listed on fourth page of search results; WT article on page one.
• Garibaldi Provincial Park - outline that was deleted and started from scratch. Result - ranks above WT article with same name on first page of results.
• Lions Bay-Britannia Beach - outline guide with a different name from the equivalent WT guide. Substantially rewritten. Result - ranks on first page of Google results, but below WT article.
• North Vancouver - guide status article where I've rewritten the lede, Understand, added a map and added several new listings. Result - now on the second page of Google results (previously not ranked at all); WT guide on first page of results.
• Pemberton (British Columbia) - outline article that's been substantially rewritten. Result - search result depends on how name is searched. Just "Pemberton" lists WT ahead of WV on page two, while "Pemberton British Columbia" lists WV ahead of WT on page one.
• Queenstown-Lakes - outline that had its lede re-written and content added to nearly all of the other sections. Result - ranks on first page of Google results, but below WT article.
• Shanghai - guide article with quite a bit of work done but a fair bit of the original text remains (maybe half). Result - listed on fourth page of search results; WT article on page one.
• Tokyo/Roppongi - guide article with a new Understand section and updated listings (some new, some deleted, some modified). Result - on the second page of Google results; WT guide on first page of results.
• Travemünde - outline article on WT that's been rewritten and now nominated for Star on WV. Result - ranks on first page of Google results, but below WT article.
• Vancouver - guide status article where I've rewritten the lede and Climate section but nothing else. Result - still lost in the nether world of Google search results.
• Yowah - usable article that was deleted and recreated with the same content (with permission). Result - ranks above WT article with same name on first page of results.

Cheers. -Shaundd (talk) 00:20, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Just a reminder to make sure you turn off personal search results when doing this test! You can do so by clicking the globe icon (as opposed to the head icon) in the upper-right corner of the Google search results page.

• Letchworth State Park — Outline that was almost entirely rewritten in March, with pictures added; Buy, Eat, Drink, and Go Next left as-was. Our article is now number 2 on the list, with WT's article number 1.
• Erie Canal — Outline itinerary with lots of background info but only a few actual destinations. I've since added several more destinations. Our article is number 4 on the search results; WT's is number 2.

-- LtPowers (talk) 16:26, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I've been rewriting and adding a number of cities in the Netherlands and checking SEO results too. The best results I'm seeing are for articles that were skeletons at the old site, have been deleted here and recreated as full texts. Example: Roermond (result: 5th, after eg tripadvisor, but above WT). JuliasTravels (talk) 20:20, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Should we make a table of these on the front page? --Inas (talk) 23:08, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

A table is a good idea. I struggle with them so I took the easy way out and just made bullets to save time (sorry!). -Shaundd (talk) 23:12, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I've created a table now and included Manchester, Bolton and Horwich within it. Manchester's still proving elusive, but Horwich is one below the WT article, whilst Bolton is one of the few articles imported from WT that are now ranked above their equivalents there. --Nick ^talk 23:52, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I created an article on Sharon (Connecticut) on Sunday, and I see it nowhere in my Google search results. How long does it usually take before articles are indexed by Google? Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:22, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Nick - nice table!

Ikan - I think it's taken up to two weeks for new articles I've worked on to appear in Google results (but sometimes faster). Significant changes to existing articles have taken 4-5 weeks to be reflected in the search results. It doesn't seem to be a fast process. -Shaundd (talk) 00:45, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Nick - I'm showing our Bolton article as #2, below WT's at #1. This is with personal search results turned off. LtPowers (talk) 14:15, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Whoops! Maybe I spoke a bit too soon! I can't work out how to turn off personalised search in Google's new look - any ideas? --Nick ^talk 16:01, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Are you using google.com or google.co.uk? The switch is prominent on the former but I can't it at the latter. But that could be because I'm not signed in. LtPowers (talk) 23:10, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm on .co.uk, but it's proving a bit elusive! I have tried signing out and changing my supposed location, but I don't know quite how it works. I can only presume that you're right and I'm still viewing personalised results. --Nick ^talk 23:12, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Also, I notice Shaun had Yowah as an article that ranked above WT. However, my searching previously and now shows that it actually doesn't rate (i.e deleting a recreating an article does nothing). I think we're mixing up WP, accidentally. Can someone else confirm that it doesn't appear for them? --Inas (talk) 04:25, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I have ours at #2 and WT's at #3, with personalized results off. LtPowers (talk) 12:26, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I should point out that I'm searching for "Yowah travel guide"; if I search for just "Yowah", WT appears on the first page, but WV does not in the first 10 pages. LtPowers (talk) 12:27, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Same here, just Yowah gives me nothing for us, but both Yowah travel and Yowah travel guide put us second, above WT (personalized results off). JuliasTravels (talk) 09:51, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Okay, the difference is between google.com.au, and google.com. google.com.au Yowah travel guide doesn't rate. It's first on google.com. Signed out on both occasions. Okay, I'm interested in this one now, because nothing has changed except the article being recreated. --Inas (talk) 22:14, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

WT link at bottom of pages

Surely this has been discussed before, but I can't find it just now and I'm wondering...is there serious negative impact of that wt link in the attribution text on the bottom of all imported pages? The text states: This article is derived from the article Amsterdam on wikitravel.org/en in its revision as of 18:28, 29 July 2012 (UTC). There it is published under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike 3.0 License. More details and the full list of contributors can be found on the associated history page. (Wikitravel contributors are marked by the prefix WT-en.). Would it make sense to lose that direct WT link? The license gives us CC obligations towards the original authors (or their pseudonyms, if applicable). The current WT copyleft/"How to re-use Wikitravel guides" text states that one "must link back", but that notice was added after the fork so isn't applicable for the articles we imported. We could be nice and leave the mention of the old site without a link, or change to wording and link to an explanation page about the fork here on WV, with some extra info on user names and article histories and perhaps a single direct link there. Would it make a difference compared to the situation now? And am I missing a reason why we're not doing this already? JuliasTravels (talk) 20:50, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I have emailed the WMF regarding this and have not heard back. They are busy with fundraising right now. If we cannot fix it before than I will bring this issue forwards at Wikimania next Aug in London. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:34, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the fast reply, James. So the way this is done now was demanded by WMF as part of the fork agreements? Or why would we need permission? JuliasTravels (talk) 09:12, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

There's been a related discussion at meta recently (here) and a bugzilla request on the subject. Not sure how to interpret the outcome though. It sounds like "let it be" kind of recommendation to me. --Danapit (talk) 09:29, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

That's an easy kind of recommendation to give for a legal manager who has other things to worry about and obviously would prefer not having to deal with a minor issue for a small project :-) It seems just a bit too important to leave it at that, though. Just to clarify: do we /need/ WMF tech support to make this change or can we (in theory) change it ourselves? JuliasTravels (talk) 10:02, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Looking at the code again, there might be an easier way to remove/delink the second WT link since it's just a constant. The first one is linked to a specific revision from the database and is at least useful. I think it was previously created for the first Wikivoyage fork, then later applied in the second migration, so not really mandated by WMF. I wanted some legal advice because while I don't think the direct link is necessary, it doesn't mean people can't be litigious over it. -- torty3 (talk) 10:11, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

The WMF legal team will not give us advice personally or as a group. If we are able to change it we may as long as we say within the CC BY SA license. We give attribution within the history tab and IMO that is enough. They will only get involved if complaints to the foundation occur. Otherwise we will need to have discussion at Wikimania.

I guess the big question is does this attribution affect our page rank. If it does than we should worry about it. If it does't than we shouldn't. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:23, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

torty3, could you explain how to remove those links that can be removed easily? We would like to give it a try on Russian Wikivoyage, regardless of what it brings in terms of SEO. It is just annoying to see all these links, especially in those articles that we wrote ourselves. --Alexander (talk) 13:29, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

The page to edit is MediaWiki:Creditssource-source-work, which looks like:

This article is derived from the article $1 on $2 in its revision as of $3 (UTC). There it is published under the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ ">Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike 3.0 License</a>. More details and the full list of contributors can be found on the associated $5. (Wikitravel contributors are marked by the prefix $4.)

We would replace $2 with the plaintext. Since it's easy to change/revert, I don't mind doing it either. -- torty3 (talk) 14:48, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Something must be feeding those variables into that text; it seems like it would be better to change that source rather than the message. LtPowers (talk) 20:54, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

That would be the proper way, yes. It's filed at Bugzilla: 53942, but I explained at Meta that it would take a week to change/revert, and under the circumstances would prefer a quicker trial, before updating that report. -- torty3 (talk) 02:50, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Fair enough; if it pans out in the end I would suggest we make the change at the source when feasible. LtPowers (talk) 15:54, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Wow, it's so simple. Thank you very much! We will see how far we can go. --Alexander (talk) 21:00, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I was over-thinking matters :) -- torty3 (talk) 02:50, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Would it be possible to somehow isolate a bunch of articles (say 50 or so) and make this change ourself for those only? If we would have some kind of proof that losing that direct link really does have a serious positive effect, that might strengthen our cause with WMF. JuliasTravels (talk) 20:18, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Some way of testing would be nice, though I don't know if there is any other way apart from the shortcut I suggested. Somerset doesn't work as an example article except for new pages because 1) it's a new article, 2) with no pre-existing counterpart, 3) with no duplicate content. Deleting and recreating does seem to work well, but can't tell if it's because it's a new article or because of the link. Could Yowah be replicated in terms of copyright? As in, choose a page in the Netherlands for example, of entirely your own work and recreate it exactly as it is. -- torty3 (talk) 14:54, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

I think so. A page that was made back at the WT site, deleted and then recreated straight away or after some time? JuliasTravels (talk) 15:07, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Have made some changes. We now mention WT once and link to WT once. That is more than sufficient per copyright. We could even remove the bottom bit entirely and simply make a note in an "edit summary" which would than show up under the history tab. The attribution that we as contributors get is all in the history tab. There is no reason why any other entity should get any greater attribution than we get as individual contributors. This latter change though would require a bot. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:32, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank James. Personnally I don't see any reason to credit Wikitravel at all, since we all own the copyright to our own work which happened to have been done there -- 178.197.236.124 20:58, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. The fact that WMF Legal declined to require us to keep it is telling. LtPowers (talk) 02:22, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Good point. For all edits from WT, the users origin from WT is listed in the history tab. If you delete the remaining text here the in article attribution will be gone [24]. I am supportive of someone doing so. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:48, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I believe the legal issue partly stems from some of the hasty decisions that were regrettably made when this project was copied from the original source. One, all instances of the word Wikitravel being replaced with Wikivoyage without considering how nonsensical or even misleading that would make many edits. Two, the method used to import usernames from the old wiki by appending them with "WT-" creates a big problem. Although many creators of Wikitravel are here now, by far more never came. So for instance a Wikitravel user "John" is known here in page history as "WT-John". But "WT-John" does not exist. John is the author of his content. Attributing his work to someone named "WT-John" is not adhering to the CC/SA license because it attributes to the wrong user (one who in fact does not exist). From what I know of lawyers, independent of any agreement with the Wikitravel owners, I would say this would pose a very big legal stumble block for the project to get rid of the attribution links. Also in my opinion, no follow means exactly that. I doubt Wikitravel is receiving any benefit, nor we any downgrade, due to them. It is because we are still very nearly the same content that they are. That will change in time. But I would suspect google is designed to subvert quick solutions to this issue. As someone said, this is the price of forking. I agree with those saying we should concentrate on content, not on the suppositions that seo tricks are the way to more contributors. --SpendrupsForAll (talk) 02:22, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

The first point (about each Wikitravel name being pre-pended with "WT-") need not be a stumbling block if each and every page edit history that contains an editor name pre-pended with "WT-" has some small print explaining the pre-pend.

I do not believe that the "price of forking" should be eternal damnation to the fires of Google's duplicate penalty. Sorry to be so direct, but it's just Google PR bullshit to believe that "no follow means exactly that". If it really did, then there would not be so many link spammers at WT and attempts made at WP (we're still relatively immune since our tiny readership and Google ranking make us a less handsome target). Please study the SEO literature to see empirical results for ignoring the myth that "no follow means exactly that". Now you can all talk about this till the cows come home, but, the plain fact is that Frank has told you the solution and this delay in implementation is just timewasting.

I confess I am not an attorney. Unless you are, I believe I'll refrain from taking legal advice from you, as will the people whose decision this ultimately is. Although I'm sure your advice is appreciated, simply stating that explaining why we are not attributing content to its actual creators is probably not going to hold up in a courtroom. And given the litigiousness of the parties involved, and the staggering sum already spent, I doubt this will happen at all. Secondly, again though your opinion has been noted (many, many times) you've proven no expert on seo or anything else, and no experiment has yet proven that removing links, deleting and recreating articles, adding keywords to summaries, or any other trick has succeeded in improving a page's rank any more than just leaving it alone would have done. This is about having distinct content, nothing more, and I think the link removal discussion is motivated by spite as much as anything and is a distraction from our goals and values. Also, Frank, please sign your comments and refrain from referring to yourself in the 3rd person in them. It sounds puppety and we don't want to open that worm can again.--SpendrupsForAll (talk) 19:45, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Please feel free to remove this my entire reply - if you will strike your last sentence as both unfair and inappropriate to both user:W. Frank and I. Relevant commentary is on your own user page. Sorry to have been unnecessarily abrasive before. --118.93.67.66 01:00, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

To your first point: this topic of adequate attribution is not just dealt with in this sub-section, but also above if you would be so kind as to read there too.

To your second point: I think we have comprehensively proved over the course of the last year of Wikivoyage editing that, however much we improve article content incrementally, we will never beat the Google dupe penalty unless Frank's suggestions above are adopted. It's a bit chicken and egg regarding experimentation, isn't it? I do share Frank's opinion that it is best to make one co-ordinated effort to tell Google that we are a NEW site and not a mirror. Failed, Half-arsed attempts will only raise the bar for later efforts. A once-only, co-ordinated effort is required across the entire site. --118.93.67.66 01:00, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

This appears to have finally been fixed. Hooray! Hooray! The cynic in me says "About time". In case, definitely kudos to whoever did it. Pashley (talk) 23:39, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Deleted article here ranks higher than the same one at WT

Okay, this one I find odd and want to share. Our Hlotse article has been deleted 3 days ago as part of the list of outlines I'm recreating. Searching for just "Hlotse" on google gives me a link to our (currently not existing) article at nr. 4 however, while the WT one (with identical content, but actually existing) comes only at the second page. "Hlotse travel" even puts us second, after WP, and WT 3rd. The article is linked from WP, however, with a Wikivoyage-inline template. Not sure how long it'll take google to realise it doesn't exist anymore, but well.. just some food for thought :-) JuliasTravels (talk) 18:59, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

The same is true for some of the other deleted ones in my list. Searching for "Spata travel" puts us 10th, but still 5 places above WT, for example. And unless I'm blind, that one does not seem to be linked from WP. Better yet, the ones I've recreated (e.g Aquiraz travel), also show up now, and above WT. Did you guys change something or what? JuliasTravels (talk) 19:24, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

I suspect that the search engine is detecting a big change from the old page to what it sees after the page has been deleted, which is just the page title plus "There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, search the related logs, or edit this page.". If you are going to be deleting other pages and then recreating them, it might be worth waiting 2 weeks or more between deleting and recreating, so that the search engine sees two big changes in content. AlasdairW (talk) 21:11, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

If you think it makes a difference, there's no harm in trying that. Still it would be strange that a deleted version gets better results than new articles from scratch? JuliasTravels (talk) 22:12, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Andyrom75 reported the same thing happening for deleted Italian Wikivoyage articles. I think the empty WT articles don't rank well in the first place, then Wikivoyage wins out in terms of being an entirely new page with no duplicate content. Still very odd, black magic behaviour. -- torty3 (talk) 14:44, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Boost our readership by at least 400% in two months

Swept in from the pub

or get rid of Frank for six!. How can we lose? --92.26.121.21 16:46, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't think anyone is arguing to expel Frank for 6 months, at this point. And speaking personally, I hope that there is never a cause for any more blocks of his account of any length. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:13, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Like Ikan Kekek, I would not wish to lose Frank for 6 months, however, I appreciate the confidence with which he has put forward his findings and proposals. If we do implement the suggested changes, we'll have to be very organised and diplomatic about it - these are large changes. Personally, I'm happy to see parentheses replaced by a comma and extended lead paragraphs can only be a good thing. I'm slightly concerned about (although not opposed to) a change of headings, if only because I think the ones we've got are very good and will take some time to better. If we want to do this quickly (and in a single swoop), that could be a sticking point, but let's see how we go. Are we going to go ahead with these proposals? Wikivoyage is feeling a little empty at the moment... --Nick ^talk 18:23, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Changing our "traditional" section headings are just one (integral and highly important) part of a 5-point plan to kill off our "inferior mirror of Wikitravel" status with Google. Within 4 months of adopting ALL of these linked changes it will be WT that is regarded as an "inferior mirror of us" and then we can change all our section headings back again (if that's the consensus) to ram home WT's inferior status. Job done! --W. Frank^email_talk 18:36, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Please keep the discussion there if possible.Texugo (talk) 18:54, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Agreed with Frank. Being "better", while it would be great, isn't really the goal. The goal is to differentiate ourselves from WT, at least as far as Google is concerned. The problem as I see it speaks to what Nick said. Even if they're not improvements, we obviously want any changes we make to section headings, etc. to be at least equally good as what we had before. And what synonyms are there for, say, "Eat", "See", or "Do" that get the point across as well? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:11, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Eat: Eating, Dining, Food; See: Sights, Look; Do: Activities, Doing. Are these equally good? Not sure. I think "Food" and "Eating" are as good as "Eat," but "Dining" has other connotations. I think "Sights" is as good as "See," but "Look is inferior. And I think "Activities" is as good as "Do," but "Doing" is a bit strange. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:50, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm only a recent immigrant to the project but I like your verbs-as-section-titles format and wouldn't want to lose that. I can't think of many obvious alternatives but if you do change the standard sections, keeping to verbs would be nice. (eg. "Get in" could be "Enter", "Get around"->"Traverse" or even "Travel", "Buy"->"Shop", "Sleep"->"Stay" etc). - AdamBMorgan (talk) 21:18, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Would it work if we just changed some of the sections to present participles? e.g. 'Understand' -> 'About'; 'Get in' -> 'Getting in'; 'Get around' -> 'Getting around'; 'See' -> 'Sights'; 'Do' -> 'Activities' (or controversially, merge 'see' & 'do'?); 'Buy' -> 'Shopping'; 'Eat' -> 'Food'; 'Drink' -> 'Refreshment' (probably the weakest); 'Sleep' -> 'Staying' / 'Accommodatio0n'; 'Connect' and 'Go next' remain. --Nick ^talk 22:20, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

At the risk of drowning people in suggestions, how about adding the Five W's (and one H) before the verb? Get in would be How to get in; Get around -> How to get around; Understand -> What to know; See -> What to see; Do -> What to do; Eat -> What to eat; Drink -> What to drink; Sleep -> Where to sleep; Buy -> Where to shop; and Stay safe -> How to stay safe. This could be a compromise for those who like the classic ones. Now that I'm actually writing these down, though, they seem long. Oh well, it can't hurt to suggest them… Nick1372 (talk) 00:17, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I think they're pretty clunky and not good. :-) Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:35, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Stylistically consistent, unambiguous and not worse than the current standard should be the minimum requirement. Better would be good, Worse would not. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:34, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

I've tried some new headings in our Wigan article; please feel free to comment or change them - we could use that page as a sort of test bed, without disrupting the ongoing Somerset, Tasmania experiment. --Nick ^talk 10:12, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

By all means discuss whether you think there are some improved names for section titles, but please don't confuse two entirely separate and distinct issues here.

I wish to increase our readership ten-fold in a few months. This will bring us new problems in the form of increased amounts of spam but it will also bring us new editors and patrollers.

The way to do this is to convince the ever-changing Google algorithms that we are not an inferior mirror site of Wikitravel (which currently beats us in Google's organic search results for most of our articles - the exception being my experimental Somerset, Tasmania article). We only need to do this once, then IB will pull the plug on Wikitravel since their advertising revenue will fall in step with their suddenly diminished readership.

Once we have convinced Google's crawling spiders that we are a changed site we will no longer suffer the crushing duplicate penalties.

Then (within reason) this site can have all the SEO sapping section titles and banners it wants.

This sea change must be a shock and awe, once only occurrence - not a gradual change - for it to work. That is why it is a VERY BAD IDEA to have a series of ad hoc individual experiments now.

By all means discuss what section titles you want to have AFTER "A-Day + 2 months" (maybe you'll decide it's just better to go back to our traditional titles) but, the section titles for "A-Day" must not be synonyms of Wikitravel's existing titles! Remember that "A-Day" is for robot readers - not for human readers. "A-Day + 2 months" when the job is done we can go back to (pretty well) disregarding what the Google spiders read...

I'm going into hospital now so I won't be writing here for some while, so please forgive me that I won't be here to guide your efforts. I wish everyone all the best! --W. Frank^email_talk 10:48, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

I think some of us are getting ahead of ourselves with new section names and such when we haven't established which changes will do the trick, and several of us will be opposed to changing such things if not 100% established that it is what is needed. Again, I would really appreciate it if we would stop here and continue this conversation on Wikivoyage talk:Search Expedition, where this topic is already split into various different threads. We really don't need yet another parallel discussion going on here in the pub when so much has been written about it already there. Texugo (talk) 11:40, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

It's definitely a good idea to keep discussions in one place but please discuss this rationally rather than continue to try and sabotage my experimental article. It's clear that you are implacably opposed to my project to increase readership (why, I'm not even going to hazard a guess at) but surely there can be just ONE exception to the current implementation of the Google search result slaughtering banners in our thousands of articles? I know you hate seeing my empirical results prove what I'm preaching, but try and exercise some judgement and self control, please. --W. Frank^email_talk 12:23, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

I didn't simply revert your removal of the banner - I pointed you to the talk page where User:Torty3 explains how you are wrong about this. And I don't need you to tell me what my opinions are. I am not opposed to increasing readership, though I am opposed to your overly assertive and highly dismissive tactics in trying to force changes through, and I disagree that your results are empirical enough. Texugo (talk) 12:30, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

As important as SEO efforts are, over a year has passed and I'm sure we can allow a few more weeks for some additional testing if that can get us to agree on a strategy. I understand that you're impatient, Frank, and this is our highest priority, but we're not in that much of a hurry. At the same time, I do believe we should allow Frank to have his own "experimental" article without interfering. Let's just agree on a few low-traffic test articles; there's no real harm in that, especially when compared to the gains we're trying to establish. JuliasTravels (talk) 13:35, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

The test articles sound reasonable, but I'd be surprised if "changing everything at once" was hugely different than methodically updating one page at a time for SEO. The search engine is still just going to stumble across updates one article at a time as it isn't pulling the wikivoyage:database dump as one huge block. One option I'd like to see is to allow contributors to create "Whereverville/new" as a complete rewrite of an article on "Whereverville" that doesn't use any descriptive content from the old WT version. Any content added after the move to WV would be put into the new article with attribution, the old article would be discarded once the new one was at least to "usable" and the new page moved into its place. We don't have enough people to do this for every city, but having fresh content for a few of the most popular destinations would improve Wikivoyage. After all, a huge part of the reason why Evan and Maj decided a travel wiki was needed in 2003 is that it can be more current than a printed guide. Anything here that was recycled from WT is by definition anywhere from a year to a decade old, so much of it is stale. K7L (talk) 14:20, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

With regard to Google pagerank, also see bugzilla:52688 and dependency bug (please, no "me too" comments over there). --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 08:24, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

We have been very successful with a newly created article. But have we had success with a long standing article yet? I tried with Cranbrook British Columbia and while it worked briefly it than stopped working. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:05, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Airport article links

I started a discussion related to links & search at Wikivoyage_talk:Airport_Expedition#Links_from_WP.3F. Pashley (talk) 16:07, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Redirect Pages

I did a Google search for "UK travel guide" and we were nowhere to be seen (WT came third). But a search for "United Kingdom travel guide" we were findable, but not in a great position (19th). I wonder if we should do something to make redirects more visible, maybe creating List of Redirects so that they get indexed by search engines. AlasdairW (talk) 21:02, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Redirect pages are coded such that search engines should already be paying attention to them. WT doesn't have an index, and they're doing fine. LtPowers (talk) 22:28, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

As an experiment, I am going to add links to UK to a couple of low profile articles (towns in Kent) to see if this improves the ranking. I will wait a couple of days so that anybody that wants to can get "before" results. AlasdairW (talk) 22:25, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Two weeks ago, I added links to UK to three pages (Chatham (England), Chatham-Kent and Faversham). Now Google puts us in 46th position for "uk travel guide", when previously we were nowhere in 328 links. Not a brilliant result, but I think that it does show that it is worth having links to all (or most) redirect pages. Are there other redirects which were imported from WT which are likely search terms? Should we have a List of Redirects? (I assume that the search engine picked up on the WT redirects just after they were created from Recent changes.) AlasdairW (talk) 22:19, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Wigan Test

Two weeks ago, I changed the headings (and nothing else) in our Wigan article (a WT import) to see if that alone would make a difference to the page's search ranking. At present, I'm yet to see much of a difference, but let me know if you notice anything or have any thoughts! --Nick ^talk 14:19, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

And I did the same thing to Broome, to no effect. --Inas (talk) 23:02, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Duplicate content penalty

I was doing some research just before and wanted to leave this link with you all as a useful measure of how much of the content on one of our articles duplicates the content on WT. Not only does it provide a % score (lower is better), it also provides a list of content it considers to be identical in the two articles.

I popped in Doha, seeing as that's had a massive rewrite over the past few months, and apparently 28% of our article duplicates WT. It's worth noting that our updated and comprehensive Doha article is still nowhere to be seen on Google, while WT sits as Number 1. I'd like to test whether removing all instances of identical content in our article (whether that be by changing or shifting a few words around) improves its search ranking. I might have a go with Doha, attempting to bring the similarity down a notch, and see what happens in a few weeks.

Hopefully, as the founder of this expedition, I can return in a few weeks are provide a bit of focus! James A ▪ talk 05:13, 4 November 2013 (UTC)