Allow tags to be blacklisted specifically from appearing in the HTML page title

Question

The HTML page title feature which puts the most popular tag on the front of the question is a very useful tool. Problem is two-fold, however.

• It kills our game-specific SEO if we try to implement a more robust tag system than just "Tag the game". Questions will end up with the things like "boss-fights" in front of the game name, and that isn't really helpful.

• Even if the game name is organically in the title, we're still gonna get somewhat hosed in SEO. We really don't need words like "spoiler" or "game mechanics" in titles at all - on the title, what matters is the specific mechanic more than the fact it is a mechanic.

In general, the theory behind the whole "most popular tag gets in title" is that the most popular tag is the most prominent categorization of the question. It works excellently on Stack Overflow, Super User, Ask Ubuntu, Seasoned Advice... actually, it works pretty well on almost every site on the network. In general, the superset tag is going to be the most popular tag.

Gaming is an exception, though, by necessity. The most prominent element of any question about a game is going to be "What game is this?". However, a game name is not as eclipsing as, say, C# is for Stack Overflow or Windows is for Super User. The platform and genre are the supersets of the game titles, but they are not as important as the game name in terms of identifying the question.

Because they are not the superset, game titles are very easy to get shafted by our SEO optimization, turning it into SEO de-optimization. After some chat, Fabian came up with what I agreed was a viable alternative to changing how the tags are arranged. Please allow us to be able to blacklist certain tags from showing up in the title.

There are far more tags that will not be blacklisted, than there will be tags that we will need to blacklist. For us, we would only need it for a limited number of tags like platforms, genres, and a handful of superset elements like achievements or weapons. Thus, it will not require a whole bunch of continual maintenance as the majority of future incoming tags will generally be of the game-name variety, which should not be blacklisted.

Answer 1

In general, the theory behind the whole "most popular tag gets in title" is that the most popular tag is the most prominent categorization of the question. It works excellently on Stack Overflow, Super User, Ask Ubuntu, Seasoned Advice... actually, it works pretty well on almost every site on the network.

Correct, so the best course of action is to attack the social problems unique to tagging on this site, not proposing global changes to the engine.

Questions will end up with the things like "boss-fights" in front of the game name, and that isn't really helpful.

Because of its nature, this site needs to be religious bordering on zealotry about enforcing three rules:

1. No meta tags, under penalty of death. Meta tags are normally dangerous in our engine as a general rule, but here they are absolute poison.

2. Avoid generic "concept" tags. For example, rather than [boss-fights], stick to game-specific tags (a good example of this is [zerg], [terran], etc) that offer better information scent for the particular game like say the actual name of the boss in question, and also won't become generic catch-all tags that nobody actually ever clicks on or subscribes to. Another example: I would also argue that [trophies] and [achievements] is a better set of tags than a generic [achievements] tag as it implies superior platform information scent; it is highly unlikely as an Xbox 360 only owner I would ever, ever care about ps3 trophies in any game; grouping them isn't helpful and creates another uber-tag that will dominate smaller tags.

3. Use as few tags as possible. But rather than spending a lot of time debating the merits of a particular non-game-name tag, ask yourself -- do we even need this in the first place? Omit needless words. Unless the game in question has hundreds or thousands of questions, it really isn't necessary to start slicing and dicing them into sub-categories. Either you are interested in that game, and click through to read the question, or you aren't.

As mentioned before, we've done two things to assist here:

1. Cleaned up, as much as we can, all the meta-tags and generic concept tags. This strictness has to be maintained going forward. Simplicity of tagging is always preferred; why does it need to be more complex than "hey, if you play this particular game, click here?"

2. We changed the site-specific value determining the number of tags we will include in the title (that is, if they aren't already there organically in the question title) from 1 to 2.

We've seen a big jump in traffic on gaming after these changes, though it's hard to disambiguate anything traffic-wise from the 100 year storm that is Skyrim. But since typically 90% of our traffic is from Google search result hits, I suspect #1 and #2 above have paid off -- so your question was definitely warranted.

Answer 2

I would suggest a more radical solution, such as the use of primary and secondary tags.

Primary tag would be the very to which the question is directly related, and secondary ones would be complementary. This does nothave to be more cumbersome than just typing ahead tags. Instead of having two input fields, the first one would be the primary, the rest secondary/complementary.

Example:

the-witcher-2 (primary) spoiler character-development (both secondary)

Needless to say, only the primary tag would be shown on the page.