General

I will say this not every forum in the world is going to rank top and perform as each one of us is expecting to become. The time flarum developers have consumed developing the core there's no one here can actually be considerable near to pay for their work ✌️ They have setup almost everything that is needed or you can dream off

Don't sleep on your work and expect magic to happen over night. Even a worse/bad created script can receive much help from you, this could be how you portray either an article or a service that is in demand, and geo targeting.

If its an article, check whether does the title correspond with your message, are there similar words that can be found? Are there keywords inside sentences. Actually these studies are not for free that's why the upcoming find it hard in the game. They either trying to form their own new keywords or bad grammar. Internet is vast, don't accept that to happen to you.

When you earn money do you usually eat it all? 😅😅 Or invest it? Where do you invest it? It matters a lot if you don't consider to invest it in your website. Again investing in your forum is a huge topic! You can immediately know a good performing forum just by how you found it. Its not easy. There many out there which are seeking the same position day and night.

When you start a marathon posting discussions just know also you'll have to go deeper in your pocket. Even crawlers do get tired ☹️ And with geo it doesn't mean you would rank worldwide, you have to bounce with those graphs there no favors

Let them come and ask how you did that? 💚

Hari the PR to core was merged, making the changes available for 1.4+. I'll probably make my test extension available for Flarum v.1.4 and then move it to another team with more options.

I've now also published the example extension: https://packagist.org/packages/luceos/flarum-ext-dofollow. This extension only works on Flarum v1.4 and up. It only acts as an example how the new Link extender in core works, there's no configuration, no settings. But you can mimic what I've done in a local extender for complete flexibility and other extensions might provide an actual ux for this feature.

The extension works like this, in case the link is from the same domain as the community it:

  • sets target to _self
  • sets rel to ugc

Otherwise it:

  • sets target to _blank
  • sets rel to noopener ugc nofollow

      thanks a lot for stepping into this and solving it 🙇🏼‍♂️

      luceos same domain

      you mean domain, sub domain, sub directory as same domain right?

      🚀 ♥🧡💗💓❤

          Hari you mean domain, sub domain, sub directory as same domain right?

          Just a very quick review of the code (didn't dive to deep) it would be whatever the URL of the forum is under, so for discuss it will match discuss.flarum.org but not flarum.org (assuming I remember how the functions work)

            CyberGene I just don’t understand why the crawler needs internal links. The crawler already has all the discussions from the sitemap and will crawl through all the posts in each discussion because the posts are part of the discussion, so it can directly crawl through them. It doesn’t need internal cross-post links to function properly.

            This is not about indexing, but positioning in search results. Internal links increase "strength" of linked pages, which increase its position in search results. Google may be able to index all forum with "nofollow" on all internal links, but position of some links may be lower than without "nofollow" on internal links.

                rob006 has this been confirmed by Google? To me it seems very easy for a website to create fake ranking by creating zillions of internal cross-links to trick Google into thinking the website links are high-ranked but I highly doubt Google would be so stupid to work this way. Only external links should matter for ranking.

                    CyberGene has this been confirmed by Google?

                    I'm not sure if Google officially confirmed it (they rarely share how their internal algorithm works), but I feel like this is a common knowledge, you can read about it on any SEO blog: https://yoast.com/internal-linking-for-seo-why-and-how/, and I've seen how improvements in internal linking improve position in search results.

                    To me it seems very easy for a website to create fake ranking by creating zillions of internal cross-links to trick Google into thinking the website links are high-ranked but I highly doubt Google would be so stupid to work this way.

                    That would be true only if you implement it in dumb way. But it does not work as simple "one internal link = 1 point, 1 million links = 1 million points". Every page shares its own link juice, which is shared between all links. The more links you have on one page, the less value each link will have. Also "amount" of link juice depends on strength of particular page. If you have garbage page with millions of inks, you get nothing from internal links. But if you have regular page with natural linking, this allows you to bump some pages and suggest which pages are more important. For example if you have support-like forum, where you have one canonical discussion with question and answer, and 10 duplicated discussions with the same question, you close duplicates with link to canonical discussion. In this way you suggest, that if someone search the same question in google, search results should promote canonical discussion over one of 10 duplicates (because canonical discussion have more internal links).

                    Only external links should matter for ranking.

                    External link are not that much more reliable - you still could have farms of links on external domains, so Google needs to mitigate linking manipulations anyway.

                      6 days later

                      CyberGene I just don’t understand why the crawler needs internal links

                      Because that's how link juice flows. It's a part of on-page SEO. It can't be ignored.

                        8 days later

                        So, I installed the extension after the upgrade to 1.4. I have a 1.3 copy of my forum. I opened one and same discussion on both and compared page sources. They are the same. For instance, if someone replies to another member, the link to that is not having “nofollow” both in 1.3 and 1.4. I really can’t see what the original problem was.

                        Well, I checked that if someone explicitly posts a link to another discussion, then indeed in 1.3 there’s a “noopener” whereas in 1.4 there isn’t.

                        So, was that the big deal? Posting explicit links to other discussions? If that’s the case, this seems like a very minor issue for my forum since I have probably 10 such links on my forum out of 15k posts. Or am I missing something here?

                        @Hari and the rest who really wanted this one. Let’s clarify what exactly was needed because I’m confused.

                        I have registered a sitemap with Google. All discussions are listed there. When the crawler starts its job, it will go through each discussion URL from the sitemap. Then in order to crawl all the posts (since there’s paging) it will have to follow the links to the other pages. My understanding was those links to the other pages are “noopener” and as a result Google is unable to crawl through all the posts. Hence your request here. However it turns out that is entirely not true. Am I right? Or am I missing something?

                        On a further inspection it seems like the only applicable scenario is when a user copied a link to another discussion/post and pasted it explicitly as link in a discussion/post. Is that correct? If so, then I really misread the stuff and I don’t need the new extension at all. On my forum we discuss pianos and sometimes we may say “look at what we already discussed in that other discussion” by linking to it but it’s so rare it could never have happened as well for the entire life of the forum.

                        @luceos what is your opinion?

                          CyberGene I strongly recommend to read this thread, it was already explained what it is about. And no, it is not about "noopener".

                              CyberGene There is no link, because you are already in discussion I was talking about. I already explaied why it matters. It also does not cost anything and it could improve SEO. So amount of posts advocating against this is just mind boggling. It really should be straightforward bugfix included in core - since core is responsible for adding nofollow rel tag, it should do it properly, without compromising SEO.

                                  rob006 ahh, OK. I have read this discussion a few times already. Just did again.

                                  I think I have the answer to myself already. It’s all about user posted links. Like copy/pasting a link to one discussion in another.

                                  I got confused that there’s a bug which prevents Google from indexing all posts. Which BTW is what the author @Hari alluded to in one of his posts.

                                  Now that it’s all bright and clear for me what exactly the issue is, I understand what some people believe it can help them with: higher ranking. There’s no proof if that’s really the case but I’m perfectly OK with people asking for something they believe is true.

                                  However on my forum we rarely post links to the forum itself (cross-discussion links), so to me it’s a total “noissue”, pun intended 😀 I’ve disabled the extension already.

                                  But I think I learned something from this discussion, both technically about how indexing works (and presumably ranking), as well as how touchy the topic about SEO ranking for some people is, so I apologise if I was being insensitive.

                                      There’s no proof if that’s really the case but I’m perfectly OK with people asking for something they believe is true.

                                      is this some kind of bullying? as flarum continues to grow we flarum-mates have the right to request for SEO improvements if other members of the forum continue to call us OBSESSED, OBSESSION i am sure no one will prefer to use flarum. i see companies like Nothing Phone using flarum https://nothing.community/ if one of the SEO guy from that company reaches here to request improve SEO you will be responding to them in the same manner?

                                      i asked two times to lock this discussion i don't know why mods do not do that small favour. now i regret being around here and I want to delete all of MY posts and discussions on discuss.flarum.org which is not possible

                                        Hari I think you are overreacting. I said I understand some people are more touchy about SEO ranking and I apologised if my previous comments were a bit dismissive towards those people.

                                        I apologise again if you felt bullied by me. That’s not the case and I only questioned the need for what you requested. I am in my rights to find something minor and not really important and state it here. If there are a few people who disagree with you, that doesn’t mean they are bullying you. I am not a native speaker, so I’m not sure what sub-meaning there is to “obsessed” but I don’t think it’s an insulting word, nor can be considered bullying.

                                        Once again, if you felt bullyed by me, be sure that’s not the case at all and I never meant to do so.

                                          CyberGene There’s no proof if that’s really the case but I’m perfectly OK with people asking for something they believe is true.

                                          It is funny that you're questioning influence of nofollow rel tag in terms of removing it for internal links, but you don't questioning idea of automatic adding it to all links (which Flarum already does). If nofollow does not change anything, then there is no point of adding it by Flarum. 😉

                                              rob006 these are two separate things. Using nofollow has been a recommendation by Google itself which was introduced to combat deliberate schemes for improving page ranking, see this: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify

                                              It concerns user generated content which is what a forum is about: posts with user generated content.

                                              Now, internal links should usually not be marked as nofollow but, and that's the important thing, the reason is to allow for better indexation of the websites, so that the crawler can follow the internal cross-links and crawl through the entire website. But, this is valid only for regular websites where you have a bunch of pages, some of which may not be otherwise known to Google unless linked to from other pages on the same website. And this is not what a forum is. A forum has threads/discussions with posts. All that is visible to the crawler. All posts are available and accessible and you don't need to post links to one post from another post.

                                              There's just a lot of misunderstanding and people just follow (no pun intended) blindly some generic recommendation about SEO they read on the Internet, without actually realizing what's the real meaning behind that. I stand behind these words. Can you tell me why you would need to have cross-post and cross-discussion links to your Flarum to improve its SEO? I never had answer to that question. Nor I have seen Google recommending that you provide such links for a forum to improve its ranking, nor its indexation. As I said, you have the sitemap provided to Google and it already sees all your discussions and posts, that's about it. Linking to particular posts from other posts is a dubious advantage.

                                              But anyway, there's an extension which @luceos prepared, that's pretty nice of him, so problem solved, all people are happy 🙂 What I wanted to clarify is why that is important because by reading this discussion I thought something was wrong with Flarum and my forum won't get indexed correctly, or will get ranked really low due to a faulty link handling. Which is not the case, and I doubt you would disagree.

                                                  CyberGene There's just a lot of misunderstanding and people just follow (no pun intended) blindly some generic recommendation about SEO they read on the Internet, without actually realizing what's the real meaning behind that. I stand behind these words.

                                                  I'm sorry, who you are exactly to make such statements? I'm curious what kind of experience and authority you have to void tons of articles about internal linking and link juice from SEO experts? Or even insights from Google employees: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/internal-linking-critical-for-seo/441381/