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The following questions just hit the front page of the site by virtue of recent title edits.

Why aren't these duplicates?

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  • @PolyGeo See also my meta Q about over-long question titles. genealogy.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2064/1006 Putting in "understanding if" at the front will push the non-duplicate content out of the box if the question is shared on Twitter. It's not going to make the question pop in a search engine, so why include it? – Jan Murphy Mod Feb 8 '19 at 1:28
  • How many characters are you targeting for our question titles to be good question titles for Twitter? – PolyGeo Mod Feb 8 '19 at 2:01
  • @PolyGeo I'm not sure, but I added a recent pair of screenshots to my previous Meta Q, so you can see what a difference it makes when the shared questions have a concise title. – Jan Murphy Mod Feb 8 '19 at 8:21
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Those are not duplicates because no one has voted to close them as such.

I suspect that they should become duplicates.

I edited their titles to try and make them look more like questions that may be duplicates of one another.

How the questions appear on Twitter is one consideration for what makes a good title but it is not the only one.

These title edits are part of an attempt to try and identify what might make a good title for one Canonical Q&A on understanding autosomal DNA results. They make these questions start to show up in the sidebar as Related, even without being linked to each other, by virtue of their titles having similar structure.

I only edited three to get a feel for whether doing more later might be useful or not.

The titles on those three questions have since been shortened to try and make them better for Twitter.

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  • In my comment I also suggested incorporating phrasing that might be in someone's search on a search engine (I just edited the comment for clarity). A quick glance to the right of the screen at the Hot Network Questions can give us an idea of whether other sites are being concise or verbose. – Jan Murphy Mod Feb 8 '19 at 8:25
  • Your newer edit looks good -- those seem more likely to show up when people are searching. – Jan Murphy Mod Feb 8 '19 at 8:45
  • Cyn and I are working on the canonical Q&As -- this one is next on my list! I'm waiting for somebody to review what I've already done (in the chatroom dedicated to the subject) before I start publishing mine. – ColeValleyGirl Mod Feb 9 '19 at 7:38

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