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Should the game name be included in the title?
When questions in Video Games are about a specific game, should we expect askers to put that game's name in the title? Or is it enough to merely tag it with that game.
2 answers
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The name of the game should go in every question title.
The tag isn't always shown with the question, so it isn't enough context. When I look at the video-games tag I see the following where the tag with the game name isn't shown:
From an search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, it would be much better to have the game name in the title of the question and therefore the title of the page. Google uses the title tag as a very strong signal as to what the page is about. If the game isn't specified in the title, search engines are much less likely to rank questions and answers here well.
What is in the title wouldn't have to be the the full name of the game. When people are playing a game and searching for hints, they often search for an abbreviation:
- BoTW instead of "Zelda Breath of the Wild"
- CoD instead of "Call of Duty"
For SEO and usability, it would also be much better to have the game name near the end of the title rather than at the beginning. Titles should have the most specific things first (the actual question) and the context at the end (game name, the name of this site.)
There is also the issue of duplication. You could ask "How do I make money early?" in the context of dozens of games. Google is likely to view pages as duplicate and not index one of them if they have the same page title. Google's advice is to always write a unique title for each page.
I would recommend using the convention of tacking "in game name (or abbreviation)" to the end of every question title. For example:
- How do I make money early on in BoTW?
- How do I make money early on in CoD?
- How do I make money early on in Soviet Republic?
For sample questions I asked, I elected to avoid the question in the title. My reasoning:
- It is redundant because the tag is already there
- If you clicked on the tag, you would get a list of questions with much repetition, which is aesthetically not nice
- On Software Development, we don't put the language name in titles, the tag is enough
- Sometimes Video Game questions get shown out of context (in the hot questions), and it sounds like they're not about video games because it's not obvious, which I find humorous
I don't consider the above a definitive argument. But my personal preference is no in title, only in tags.
If there is no tag for that game, and the user cannot create it, obviously it should be in the title.
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