Release

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) improvements


 

Check out our guide: 5 steps to prepare your Community for SEO here!

 

We have been working on a number of improvements for the SEO performance of our platform. Many of these improvements were based in your feedback and ideas that you posted in our ideation category. Read more to find out which improvements have been implemented.

 

Meta title and Meta description

Inspired by Change meta title and description from @Ilse 

The SEO title is displayed on your browser tab and tells you what page you're on. SEO titles and descriptions are also read by search engine robots and seen by users searching the web. We have added SEO settings to the home- and category pages where you can change the meta title and meta description of a page. 

Learn how to change the meta title and description for your home- and category pages in this article: Meta title and meta description

 

SEO Settings for category pages

 

Archive / Hide old content

​Inspired by Archiving - improve customer experience by showing them only relevant content from @Florian 

As your community grows and starts collecting more content over time some content might become outdated and irrelevant. To make sure your users find relevant content you want to hide older content. We have added additional settings to category pages in control to hide old content from search engines as well as your platform search (live-search dropdown and search result pages)

Hiding content happens on a category level, which means that an entire category and all the topics inside the category can be archived/hidden at once. Learn more about hiding older content: Hide old content from search engines and your platform search

 

Structured Data for articles and unanswered questions

Inspired by Use Google Structured Data to display enriched FAQs and How-Tos from @bjoern_schulze 

We enriched article topics with structured data. Google search results for eligible articles may have an enhanced appearance in search results. Enhanced features can include placement in the Top stories carousel, host carousel, Visual stories, and rich result features such as headline text and larger-than-thumbnail images.

In order for articles to be eligible for this enhanced appearance they need to have a featured image and a logo. We’ll reuse the logo that you provided in Control → Customization → Header → Logo for this.

More info on structured data can be found here: Structured data for Articles, Structured data for QA

 

Other SEO Improvements

Next to the improvements above we made the following smaller under the hood optimisations:

That’s everything for this update, we hope you like the new improvements we made.

That’s a really nice and big package of updates! Thank you! We will check everything asap and set them up.


Some really nice updates here!


We’ll reuse the logo that you provided in Control → Customization → Header → Logo for this.

Our community has a Server Side Include (SSI) configuration instead of the default one. Where does the logo come from in this case?


 Our community has a Server Side Include (SSI) configuration instead of the default one. Where does the logo come from in this case?

It still comes from there 🙂 We’ll move the logo upload to another place. Meanwhile, you can activate default header, upload logo, switch back to SSI and then save changes - bit of a workaround but this should work


Thank you! This workaround is no problem.

Another question regarding the logo:
If I understand correctly, this logo is used for different purposes, including social sharing to Facebook and now Google Structured Data. Facebook recommends you use images that are at least 1200 x 630 pixels for the best display on high resolution devices. For Google Structured Data (Articles) the logo has to fit into a 600 x 60 box. I haven’t found a solution yet how to adhere to both. What is your recommendation? How does inSided do it themselves?

I also used the testing tool for Structured Data in order to get a preview on how articles would look like on Google, but the tool doesn't seem to recognize any elements. It looks like as if the structured data isn’t live yet.

edit: When I check an inSpired article, it seems to work.


We used the guidelines from Google Structured Data (Articles) that says 600x60 (we scale logo’s to 60 height so the comply with the guidelines). We’ve also validated articles with the testing tool you linked to. It might take some time to index. Unfortunately it doesn’t support a rich/visual preview, which is possible with this test tool


Thank you!

Regarding test tool: The one you linked doesn’t work for me either, neither with our community articles nor inSpired articles (but it shows different error messages in both cases).

@all: Is anyone able to get previews that work? 


The one I linked to (https://search.google.com/test/rich-results) is a beta test tool that supports some rich previews. e.g. when I insert a link to a QA topic it will show me a rich preview of a QA topic like this: 

 

 

We did validate our aticles with this testing tool that you linked to (testing tool for Structured Data). But unfortunately this testing tool does not support rich previews (like above) for articles. Hope this clarifies some things :)


The one I linked to (https://search.google.com/test/rich-results) is a beta test tool that supports some rich previews.

Thanks for sharing, did not know this is possible… super handy!

 


We are planning to upload PDF files and will be linking from our posts to the PDF files. We don't want Google to index the PDF files and want to use x-robot-tag to noindex the PDF files. How can we block PDFs on our own using x-robot-tag?

Thanks!


I’m not sure how this would work, not familiar with this to be honest. Are you planning to host the PDF files on your own server and add URLs to these files in the topics or do you want to upload/attach these PDF files directly to a topic?


We’d probably be attaching them to topics. Our SEO lead sent me this article with instructions: https://geoffkenyon.com/how-to-remove-pdf-files-google/


Thanks for sharing. The documentation mentions the following; 

In order to apply the x-robots noindex tag to you will need to be able to edit your .htaccess file.

It’s not possible to edit the .htaccess file on our platform so I’m afraid this won’t be possible


Thanks for looking into this @Yoeri