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Some of the tags we are forced to use on Gaming.SE are fairly awkward or acronymirific because of the plague of sequelitis rampant in the industry. As a result, it seems like our SEO can be pretty terrible at times, even if the tag we pick looks the best to us in our own little vacuum.

A longer tag length would be nice (say—double), but as a possible alternative, how about allowing an alternative expansion of the tag name when it's added to the page's HTML title?

I'm trying to draw some (distant) parallel to Wikipedia's DISPLAYTITLE where some code in the article can be used to change the title appearance.

Here perhaps it could work where the tag expands into [random terrible ideas].

  • Whatever the first first-level heading in the tag wiki is (perhaps with the strict constraint it's the very first thing on the page)
  • Whatever is in some magic code on the tag wiki
  • Whatever is in a new "Title" field

If nothing fulfills whatever criteria, it just uses the tag as it does now.

In any case, the result would be that some question tagged , for example, would have "Star Wars: The Old Republic" in the page (HTML) title, in lieu of acronym-rich gamer jargon. I don't think such abbreviations are functionally bad, they just look bad.

Some cases may actually be worse: in looking at some PlayStation tags and how they get parsed when Googling, it's not immediately apparent that ps4 == playstation 4. In any event, the proper title could be omitted or modified to reflect the best SEO option.

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  • I think getting rid of the double tag thing would go nicely with this (presuming it's actually the game tag that gets put in the title).
    – John
    Jan 8, 2012 at 2:09
  • @BobCratchit do you mean how Gaming.SE uses the top 2 tags vs. 1 in our title? That's beyond the scope of this idea as it is, though perhaps a tag with an explicit title/name could somehow override a more common one (hrm...)
    – Nick T
    Jan 8, 2012 at 2:12
  • Personally I hate tags in the title, unless they are absolutely necessary... after a quick look at gaming.se, I have to ask: how much of a problem is this really? On the active questions page, I see zero questions using the cryptic swtor tag in the title.
    – slugster
    Jan 8, 2012 at 2:21
  • 4
    @slugster I mean the <title>
    – Nick T
    Jan 8, 2012 at 2:22
  • Good suggestion IMO.
    – user154510
    Jan 8, 2012 at 2:23
  • @Nick, that clarifies it, thanks :)
    – slugster
    Jan 8, 2012 at 2:33
  • @BobCratchit: To get the game name in the title only, we'd need an important tag feature, which Jeff vetoed.
    – Ullallulloo
    Jan 9, 2012 at 23:07

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