Implement better meta descriptions for SEO

Hari

This is very important! flarum is showing a tag's description as the description for the discussion page. it should display the content from the first post. imagine if I have 100 discussions under one tag all those page descriptions will be the same and if a discussion has 2000 posts all the post pages description will be from the tags.

even the 2000th post should display the description from the first post (as observed at discourse)

clarkwinkelmann

Hari natively it shows the forum description set in Administration > Basics, not the description of a tag.

I believe the SEO implements using the first discussion as the source for the meta description.

There's also this other extension by Blomstra which might be implementing it https://discuss.flarum.org/d/27092-blomstra-meta-an-open-graph-and-schemaorg-extension-with-cards

Hari

clarkwinkelmann the flarum core needs to offer this as standard irrespective of extension. (Expectation)

I have noticed pages are not ranking well, I'm thinking maybe same description to all pages is one of the reason.

Good SEO > good ranking > traffic > community will grow > they create more discussion > more traffic.

Wordpress, discourse, Quora everyone displays description from the page, sir it's basic SEO rule.

We may rely on a extension to override this behaviour but overriding always causes additional load. (I don't know how it works)

Hari

Request admin change the tag to Resource > Service

clarkwinkelmann I am not facing this issue, if a discussion has multiple tags it's getting the description from the first post. flarum is only site having this issue. my website is displaying everything correctly. i am bit confused to see why discuss.flarum.com Is not functioning properly. I think SEO extension is taking care of this? (confused)

Hari

clarkwinkelmann i have checked, SEO extension is doing the needful job. But flarum should have it in the core.

How can be all discussions (pages) have same meta description from tags (categories) if we have 28k pages all meta description will be same? (If we have single genral tag)

Since flarum is supporting meta description (it's coming from core) all we are expecting it to function correctly, I don't think community should ignore this. Please make flarum SEO friendly 💪

Prosperous

Hari Done. 👍️

askvortsov

Hari SEO extension is doing the needful job. But flarum should have it in the core.

If it's getting the job done well, why does it need to be in core?

Hari

askvortsov why core is doing it wrong? 🙃

askvortsov

Hari I don't think it's fair to say that core is doing it "wrong". Core is just not doing it beyond adding support for the field being set.

Once again, what's the issue with this feature being in the SEO extension? Is that breaking your forum somehow, or causing issues? I find it challenging to understand the obsession with putting things into core that don't need to be there. It just creates more work and more maintenance obligations for our team, which could otherwise go to implementing/supporting things that aren't yet possible.

Hari

askvortsov This conversation is more like asking to put a headphone jack in the iPhone.

frankly speaking, only there are around 15-20k users who downloaded the SEO extension out of 248k flarum core downloaders which means most of them are not using SEO extension.

when we can not travel one more mile for SEO reasons how can we call ourselves SEO friendly software?

there is a huge difference when things come out of the box compared to using add-ons/adapters

i am not asking for new features , i am only pointing out the thing which flarum is currently not doing it correctly. fixing flarums mistakes using an extension is really unacceptable.

if a discussion has 3500 posts which means it has 3500 pages according to google since each post gets a unique URL all pages are unique and all pages should not have the same description. The worst part is page description is not at least the first post content it is coming from a category !

in fact, each post page should have a meta description of its own content instead of the first post content as description. i don't think flarum devs will understand this (let's do not get into this)

Any CMS or any web software's basic responsibility is to provide minimum SEO features like page title, description and keywords. as google is no longer considering keywords what else google will consider? title and page description for which flarum is suggesting to relay on a 3rd party extension.

if you really want to make the core more dev friendly and easily upgradable remove page titles and descriptions and canonical URLs and everything from the core and release an official flarum SEO extension like the way react is doing (React Helmet)

if flarum is really SEO friendly software you should take over the SEO extension and declare it as its part of flarum and continue to improve based on users feedback

if flarum is suggesting installing a 3rd part extension it means flarum is not at all SEO friendly?

if the whole flarum dev community can not fix/maintain this small SEO bug i doubt flarum's SEO potential in this corner.

Flarum has only 5 pages

Home
Discussion page
Tag page
Search page
User page (user posts, discussions)

why can't flarum can not support basic SEO for just these 5 pages?

Relaying on 3rd party extension is nothing but flarum users can not request the flarum community for any SEO changes. during any core updates, we need to wait for a 3rd party extension provider to update the extension and we always need to contact v17development for any small SEO change requests

This whole discussion sounds like i am being rude or making a big scene out of nothing. All i want is a better SEO friendly flarum out of the box.

Hari

Darkle I see you are very obsessed with SEO

Darkle I don't understand the obsession of some people with SEO

askvortsov I find it challenging to understand the obsession with putting things into core that don't need to be there.

asking to improve SEO is an obsession?

It's okay hari you are not alone https://www.google.com/search?q=developer+vs+seo+meme

i request the moderator to close lock this discussion. i no longer want to participate in this discussion.

luceos

Hari This whole discussion sounds like i am being rude or making a big scene out of nothing.

I understand your position very well. I've taken the liberty to move this under Proposals.

askvortsov

Hari Apologies, my response was rather harshly worded.

I've actually done a bit of a 180 in the past two hours as to SEO and Flarum. I've been trying to figure out some issues at the junction of the Blog, SEO, and Sitemap extensions that have left me somewhat concerned about extensibility of Flarum SEO. A few of the issues I discovered:

Routing

Blog implements alternative routes for some discussions. There's no way to change the canonical URL for those to point to the /blog URL. Additionally, there isn't a good way for Sitemap to generate correct URLs to those discussions. This implies the need for a ModelUrl helper, where URLs to a model's "Main Page" would be generated from the model instance, not parameters, and which could be overriden by extensions.

Content/Document

The content/document system is currently a mess, there's no other way of putting it. The way it works right now is as follows:

Content functions mutate a document object, changing some (fixed) properties.
The document class assembles the final versions of those properties into HTML fragments, which it passes to the Blade template

Among other issues, there's no way to register a globally-applicable "Content" handler which will run after the content used for a single route. Flarum Blog's BlogArticle handler registers a lot of metadata, but none of it is read by Flarum SEO's global content, because that runs first. So none of that has any effect.

For this particular one, I'm not sure of what a good solution is, but I feel like it's some combination of the following:

Allow registering globally-applicable content that runs after all other content
Integrate a lot of the SEO helper functions into core directly. Revamp the document and content system to be higher-level and more aware of SEO requirements, because I don't see a clean way for the current low-level approach to support extensibility

General SEO Thoughts

@Franz's point makes sense (as usual): we should either do it right, or not do it at all. I'm not sure that I've entirely come to the conclusion of folding Flarum SEO into core, but I'm a lot closer to there than before. Perhaps the "status check" parts and some parts (robots.txt) could stay into that extension, and the "extending the page with SEO tags" should go into core.