SEO Issues?

temey74938

I am planning to host my forum on Flarum. I wanted to know if there are issues with Flarum SEO. I have never found Flarum forum websites on Google. On the other hand, I have found tons of results for Discourse.
Is it because of SEO issues or just the sheer number of websites running Discourse vs Flarum?

Thanks!

EvilExecutor

temey74938 if you use Flarum SEO extension I think you are good to go.

010101

temey74938 sheer number of websites running Discourse vs Flarum?

This probably plays a big role. Hasn’t Discourse been around longer and without a beta label? I'm thinking (although there are some popular/busy Flarum forums) there are probably more popular Discourse forums.

clarkwinkelmann

What kind of keywords are you looking for using the search? If you search for the description of typical Flarum issues, you will see this forum often pops up, and we don't use any special extension for SEO.

It's probably different if the same keywords are present on both Flarum-powered forums and Discourse-powered forums. It would be interesting if someone found some keywords where we can directly compare SEO rankings of multiple forums discussing the same topics but running different software.

Zeokat

Flarum SEO is bad, it was discussed several times but nothing to do.
The Flarum SEO extension don't fix important stuff.

010101

Zeokat

askvortsov

Zeokat 010101 I don't think either of this is particularly productive. I'll share a bit of objective info that might be helpful:

Discourse currently has considerably higher market share than Flarum, including for more recognizable sites. This is, of course, a significant factor in site rankings
We are aware of several particular SEO issues that are on milestones to fix, most notably flarum/core#1820, flarum/core#189, flarum/core#2397, flarum/core#1913, and the list of issues @Zeokat has collected in https://discuss.flarum.org/d/5577-critical-seo-improvements
There are several extensions that implement some of these, most notably https://discuss.flarum.org/d/18316-flarum-seo

We recognize that these are important, and have plans to address them. Right now our focus is on getting to Stable and stabilizing the extension API, as that will prevent extension breaks. Contributions (via PRs or issue reporting/research) is always appreciated.

I'll also note that SEO strategies are constantly evolving. Trivial stuff that seems like nonsense and magic generally turns out to be such, since stuff that can easily be gamed is usually gamed. As a result, modern SEO tends to be more about providing search engines with the information they need (and avoiding information they don't need) than trying to implement some obscure heuristics.

JasperVriends

Zeokat Flarum SEO is bad, it was discussed several times but nothing to do.
The Flarum SEO extension don't fix important stuff.

There are indeed some things that cannot be fixed with the SEO extension (for example, the logo as h1). So the extension currently focuses on providing the correct meta-data to the search enginges using Open Graph, Schema.org and manages nofollow links. All the Open Graph data is being used by social media making sure your forum pages are correctly embeded.

But if you are missing functionality or have any feedback regarding to the SEO extension, please open an issue! That would help us improve the SEO extension even more 🙂

temey74938

askvortsov Answers my question. Thanks!

010101

askvortsov Sometimes I like to joke around. Life is short. SEO is subjective. No one but Google knows everything their search engine looks for.

MikeJones

I get decent search results in Google. Nothing beats good link juice in SEO

temey74938

Hey Team
I did a small experiment.

I created a FreeFlarum forum.
Added the SEO and sitemaps plugin.
Submitted sitemap to Google Search Console.
Created a single post with a single unique non-existent word.
Did a Google search right away. Zero results.
Waited for indexing.
3 days later did a Google search using that term and my forum post as the only result.
Experiment successful 😎 !

Convinced that there are no technical issues with Flarum. Among all options, I have decided to build a Flarum forum for my community!

Thank you all!