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Would it be possible to bring back the short, tagline-like versions of the bio, perhaps with a read-more button to expand them to the full bio?

As the artist pages stand right now, I see little point in even having the biography tab when the biography is already taking up most of the page real estate to begin with. The short taglines were earnestly my favorite feature of the site - the ability to quickly learn what an artist is about without having to read the full bio was EXTREMELY valuable to me, and in building my own personal library I often added the short bio taglines as "comments" in the metadata of my MP3s, and wrote my own when none were to be found. Besides that, I think the text wall that's taking up the bulk of the page on artist's pages is difficult to read and ugly - why have THAT much text if you can't read the whole thing right there?

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Just FYI, the short Headline Bios have been returned to AllMusic.

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SC

Oh wow, email notifications to make your day! You guys are the best, so happy to have them back!!

DM

Yeah thanks so much for the update! 

Thanks for your input. Here is some detail about this decision.

For several years, Google's search algorithm has been penalizing our Artist pages because they believe the pages have "thin content" (definition here) and are akin to spam sites or mechanically-generated sites that simply act as content farms for clicks.

This means that our pages are less easy to find in Google searches (which is the primary way we get traffic to the site).

We've made some changes to the artist pages to try to provide more content on each tab (particularly near the top of the page where the algorithm scans first) so that Google will see the value of the pages and grant us a higher page rank (therefore bringing more people to the site).

To be honest, we prefer the "headline bios" and if this change doesn't move the needle at all, we'll likely revert back to using those and try different experiments to improve our standing with the almighty Google and bring more people to the site.

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SC

Been a few months and my own usage of allmusic has unfortunately dropped off with the last of the succinct bios :( any word on this feature returning by any chance?

DM

I completely agree — I had assumed at first this was a yet unfixed error. Those tagline bios are great! Would be a shame to not see them return, as they were my favorite reason for using Allmusic.

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SC

They were the best! It's such a weird choice to ditch then that I could see it being a strange error, but it's been long enough that I'm starting to worry.

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