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I've been editing the titles to make more sense, for example "How do I do foo on Ubuntu" to "How do I do foo?" since we already know you'll be on Ubuntu (unless you specify otherwise). I've also been cleaning up the version number from the title and using a tag. Someone edited this question to make the title "more googleable".

Is this the case? I would assume that typing in what native games are available for ubuntu in google would find this site anyway. (I'm not familiar with SEO techniques)

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    This may be a good question for Webmasters StackExchange Oct 16, 2010 at 19:44
  • Yeah, it would be a great question for the Webmasters StackExchange.
    – User
    Oct 17, 2010 at 1:14
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    I've asked this on Webmasters Their answers should help us determine the best policy here. Oct 17, 2010 at 2:04
  • Personally, I would consider that particular title edit entirely superfluous. IMHO it doesn't make the post easier to find, more accurate, or better in any way.
    – Elder Geek
    Feb 21, 2018 at 15:38

1 Answer 1

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Make the question titles useful for real people first. Including "for Ubuntu" in every post would get really tiring and lead to less user participation if enforced — much more disastrous than a small loss in SEO, even if that exists.

Compare to Stack Overflow, which has questions about many different programming languages, yet it's still much more common to not include the language in the title — and the titles are usually more clear and more useful because of it. Remember that tags are displayed alongside the question title in many cases.

The analogue for us is not including the specific Ubuntu version in each question title: keep the titles shorter and more managable. Even if this only reduces clutter and text wrapping on the homepage, that would be worthwhile.

For what it's worth, "Ubuntu" is already included in every page title ("Question title - Ubuntu - Stack Exchange") plus numerous times on the page. Any search engine that can't associate Ask Ubuntu posts with Ubuntu won't have many users.

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