SEO

010101

This isn’t truly off topic, but I don’t think it fits under another tag. Maybe feedback. But, not 100%. Mods feel free to re-tag.

This may cause some passionate responses. Just be nice everyone. I see off and on people talking about SEO here. SEO has been somewhat of a mystery to me so I thought I’d post here and see what everybody thinks.

I say SEO is a bit of a mystery because, I get the basics, but search engines like Google are always changing what they consider to be important. Also, it doesn’t take long to find articles saying that many SEO tips are myths. Who do you believe?

SEO optimization tips are like fad diets. Which truly work?

Multiple times various people have said here at discuss.flarum that they wish Flarum was better about SEO. But, if I do a google search for something Flarum related all of the posts from this forum come up in the results. The reason is, no matter how “bad” a website is as far as SEO, if it has good content and is popular it will show high in search results.

It feels like, if you publish quality content and start building a following, you’ll rank higher. Period. The best SEO tools in the universe can’t beat content that people want... or luck. Let’s not forget luck. Luck/chance plays a key role in everything.

My main question: What does Flarum do or not do that is considered bad SEO practice? It has page titles, URLs which include the post title, and then search engines can pick up post text themselves. Is it due to the way things are laid out? And, whatever your response is, where do you get your SEO information and why do you trust that source?

ctx

I will take a stab at providing some insight since I've recently had to navigate the complicated waters of the Google Search Console. First and foremost, not all search engines are created equal. No surprise there.

First of all, I'm using the SEO1.0.2 plugin.

I believe that Google is going to do what they darn well please and we, as administrators, need to adjust our SEO tools accordingly. I've seen their SEO model change dozens of times over the past 10 years. At least they are making their Search Console more rich.

I used the SEO plugin to create my sitemap.
Submitted that sitemap to Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
Smaller search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, don't allow submit. They rely on "other" engines per their docs. Their search results pretty much mimic what you see returned from Google, so it makes one think they get their data from Google.
Bing and Yahoo picked up my sitemaps pretty quickly (within 2-3 days). Google, well, my implementation does not get many keyword hits, but it's very new.
You could almost set your watch to when Bing and Yahoo! bots come to visit. For me, it's usually 10PM US CST.
Google, their bot penetration is spread out through a 24 hour period with about 3-4 specific index hits per hour.
I did not submit to Yandex, but for some reason they started indexing (maybe they picked it up from Google, Bing, Yahoo).
I've not seen any rhyme or reason that any of the search bots use in regard to sequentially following the site index.

To answer the latter part of your main question, I get my SEO impact information based on watching (tail -f / grep / etc.) the Apache logs and filter on bot/spider/etc. I also use good ole Webalizer to determine search engine interest. I'm not sure if you've visited the Google Search Console, but I get a lot of my SEO impact from their GUI (I won't go into what all the features are here).

The jury is still out, but I'm quite thankful for the SEO plugin. I've had to manhandle meta-tags, robots.txt etc. in the past and that was for sure no fun.

I hope this info helps add to your inquiry.

010101

ctx I get my SEO impact information based on watching (tail -f / grep / etc.) the Apache logs and filter on bot/spider/etc. I also use good ole Webalizer to determine search engine interest.

Thanks, this is a good tip. I don’t always think about looking to see which bots have visited.

I use Google Search Console. But, I’ve also not used Search Console for a website before and Google still discovered it. I feel like their spider is trained to find new websites. Maybe not. Maybe it’s a link posted somewhere that the spider finds which in turn makes it discover the website.

My main question is more around what people think Flarum is missing or not doing right SEO wise. I guess maybe not having a sitemap without an extension? A lot of CMS platforms don’t give you a sitemap out of the box so I don’t think that would be a fair reason to say Flarum SEO isn’t good.

Zeokat

It was discussed some time ago... but since SEO wasn't a proirity i surrender. You can read also here: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/5577-critical-seo-improvements

Not sure how many of those improvemenets was added to the current Flarum version... but there are many SEO posts like that.

010101

Zeokat I wonder how much some of that stuff truly matters? Like the h2, h3, h4 stuff. I wonder how much something like that could affect search engine ranking if at all?

The meta description works for me. But, this is probably because I’m using the SEO extension? I’m not sure if certain types on characters in URLs is still an issue or not.

Maybe things have improved over the last few beta releases.

cmcjacob

010101 it matters a lot. Header tags can define page structure, here's one example of many that demonstrate this. Crawlers actually look for your content now, moreso than meta - many sites have none

rob006

010101 Maybe things have improved over the last few beta releases.

Headers structure is still a mess. 😛

010101

cmcjacob But, you can easily find articles saying they aren’t that important. Which is kind of my overall point. Who can you trust? What truly matters? I’m not sure anyone, but the people who write search engine algorithms, know.

I think many SEO tips are outdated. They don’t matter as much anymore. Maybe at one point they mattered. But, Google’s algorithm for example is probably way more advanced than it was when certain SEO guidelines were put out there.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-important-is-h1-tag-for-seo/261547/

Gaming the System

It’s been studied many times, and the studies come back with a similar conclusion:

If you already have good headings, wrapping them in H1 has some effect, but it’s small enough that “if it takes longer than an hour to implement H1 Tags on all pages and they already have some large descriptive text on the page then it is probably not worth the time required.”

JasperVriends

I'm following the SEO discussions (and some issues on GitHub) for a while now, I think it's important for Flarum to check the SEO structure, but, I also think that not many developers do know how to implement SEO correctly and I am afraid that it can be implemented in the wrong way or development of these SEO in Flarum will take too much time on updates.

As said before by someone else, even WordPress isn't able to get SEO right while there's a massive community behind it. They only deliver the core with basic SEO and make sure that works, others/companies that are specialized in SEO will create extensions/plugins to make sure things work like they should. At the other side, a simple thing like an unique description per page/discussion shouldn't be that hard to create by default for Flarum discussions.

With many extensions available to download, I think it would be hard for the core team to make SEO work for all extra data that these extensions make available to Flarum. That's why I've created the SEO plugin, to cover different extensions as they deliver different data to topics/pages/user pages.

Core or not?
An interesting question would be: what would be better, does Flarum core need to cover everything, including extensions of other developers, or just the simple SEO part and let extensions like mine cover the more advanced stuff around SEO.

Thinking about integrating these things to the core/core extensions, most of them are only getting updated after a core update (once in a few months). As the SEO part is something important (something that can change on the fly or needs to implemented/updated within a few months) it shouldn't be a good idea to integrate that to the core as it doesn't get a release/update that frequently. Important SEO features (or fixes?) can take a while before they get released to the public. I'm not sure what that will do to the ranking of Flarum sites.

Having a team around a SEO extension like mine would be a better idea to improve SEO more frequently and make releases/updates, but at the moment there aren't any contributions from other developers to the extension to improve SEO or add new features (beside the many many development hours I've put in it)...

So far the perspective from a developer 😃 I'll keep my eye on this topic

rob006

JasperVriends Core or not?

Some basic stuff, like correct headers structure, should be handled in core. It does not make sense to require separate extension to fix document structure on forum.

010101

JasperVriends An interesting question would be: what would be better, does Flarum core need to cover everything, including extensions of other developers, or just the simple SEO part and let extensions like mine cover the more advanced stuff around SEO.

My thought is that core doesn’t need to get too extreme about SEO. Because once again, I don’t even believe some things are as important as some others believe. Leave it to a specialized extension for all the reasons you stated.

And, no one has fully addressed my original question. What is Flarum missing and can you prove it’s a big deal? And before you link to an article, remember that you can probably quickly find the opposite opinion. So far I’ve heard header tags. But, the Internet doesn’t agree that structure is crucial anymore (see SE Journal article I posted above). And I’ve heard the meta description. But, @JasperVriends’ extension takes care of that. Even without that, search engines can pick out a snippet from the page and make that the description. I think I once read that even if you have unique meta descriptions, Google will sometimes ignore it and use what they want for the description.

So, I’m kind of being a broken record here because I want everyone to really think about what is important. Is a SEO tip you heard truly needed? Or, is it a myth? Or, was it important in 2005, but now it is not? Or, is it a little important, but not the end of the world?

Due to all the SEO myths out there that is yet another reason why I agree with @JasperVriends that core SEO should continue to be minimal.

Core should probably just stick with these simple guidelines:

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Basic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
Don't deceive your users.
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content
Participating in link schemes
Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
Hidden text and links
Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

The above is from https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/why-search-engine-marketing-is-necessary. The things they say make sense to me; it seems legit.

JasperVriends

rob006 I hoped for a more substantive reaction. Like, what exactly should be in the core and what not, where do we draw the line between core & extensions? Just dom structure, I think there is much more that can be done by the core, but they should be getting updated more frequently, so that can be a risk.

rob006

JasperVriends Core should care mostly about semantics, and not because of SEO, but because of way how HTML and web works. Discussion title should use h1 header, because this is title of the page. IMO users should not be able to use h1 headers in their headers and putting user name in h3 header is IMO questionable. All additional stuff, like extra meta tags can be moved to extensions, but there should be no need for extra extension to fix semantics of your forum.

luceos

My personal opinion is:

less stuff to maintain for core is better
we don't have SEO expertise to build this properly (yet)
not all forums need SEO; think about private forums
a dedicated SEO team managing a well maintained extension would make a world of difference

As such I think this is better maintained as third party extension.

PS thanks everyone for pitching in with such extensive answers.

[deleted]

@JasperVriends you should look at https://discuss.flarum.org/d/7214-the-general-blog-integration/30 and formulate your own views around that.

010101

rob006 I somewhat agree with the discussion title being h1. But after that I don’t know. Post author as h3? Why not? The author is pretty important.

Preventing a user from using h1 their post is an interesting call out... Then we start going down the road of what all should a user be able to post? Should all markdown syntax be available? Or should it be more strict? 🤔 Can’t you have more than one set of h1 tags on a page? Sounds like Google has said they don’t care: https://moz.com/community/q/is-single-h1-tag-still-best-practice

Now I’m starting to feel tired for the developers. 😆Sympathy tiredness.

And, d’oh! I forgot already, one can just disable the markdown and BBcode extensions if they want that strictness. So now it comes back around to... isn’t core fine the way it is SEO wise? It’s got the basics. I guess the hero title could be changed from h2 to h1 if everyone thought that really would help SEO. But, I don’t buy that it matters. But, I’m a stubborn goat sometimes.

JasperVriends

010101 Now I’m starting to feel tired for the developers. 😆Sympathy tiredness.

It's important to get feedback. Most SEO elements are pretty easy to implement, so that's not a problem. It's good to get feedback like that, otherwise things won't happen

rob006 Core should care mostly about semantics, and not because of SEO, but because of way how HTML and web works. Discussion title should use h1 header, because this is title of the page. IMO users should not be able to use h1 headers in their headers and putting user name in h3 header is IMO questionable. All additional stuff, like extra meta tags can be moved to extensions, but there should be no need for extra extension to fix semantics of your forum.

I agree to this. Shouldn't be hard to implement and I think it's should have. At the moment you'll see sites using <h2> with an CSS class 'h1' to give it the same style as a <h1>. This may be a solution to this

I think it's time to fork Flarum core and start doing these simple changes. Also, I just found out that there is always one H1 on the page, it's the logo 🤔 .Header-title, see the <header> component

010101 But after that I don’t know. Post author as h3? Why not? The author is pretty important.

I think it can be an URL/link only, it's not part of the story so personally I wouldn't give it a H3. My plugin for example serves the post with an 'Author' using JSON-LD for search engines. They shouldn't get confused about the content.

rob006

010101 Post author as h3? Why not? The author is pretty important.

I just don't feel that "rob006" if good header for my post. 😉 And sometimes it may conflicting more natural headers structure from posts (like releasing new version of extension - it is like new chapter in discussion).

010101 Preventing a user from using h1 their post is an interesting call out

There is plenty other header levels to use. In fact users shouldn't care whether their header is rendered as h1 or h2.

010101

JasperVriends I think it can be an URL/link only, it's not part of the story so personally I wouldn't give it a H3. My plugin for example serves the post with an 'Author' using JSON-LD for search engines. They shouldn't get confused about the content.

I can get behind that. Also, I don’t know anymore what is core and what is your extension because I’ve always used your extension. Sometimes I view the page source and I’m like... SEO seems fine to me. But, it’s because I have your extension running. 😁

jogesh

JasperVriends I am still waiting for this feature to have the H1 tag for the Discussion page.

luceos

Heated discussions are okay, but this was becoming a discussion filled with personal attacks.

I modded some posts so that the tone of voice remains a bit friendlier.

Comparing Flarum with Wordpress for the sole purpose of pointing out SEO argumentation is okay. But don't judge others for their opinions, each have a right to their own, agree to disagree is also a possible outcome.

[deleted]

luceos But don't judge others for their opinions, each have a right to their own, agree to disagree is also a possible outcome

I can certainly live with that. @rob006 let's bury the hatchet here please. We can all benefit from each other's views and expertise in various fields - all of which will make the product we are all using a much stronger one.