SEO Technical reference: Rank improvement

  • 25 October 2017
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For the community results to lead the user’s search engine results page (SERP), it is important for the community to receive a good rank from Google.



Search engines like Google use over 200 factors to asses any website’s quality ranking, including relatively fixed ones like “domain age” and DMCA Complaints. Others can be more diverse, such as “Facebook shares” for a page and “spelling and grammar” in content (source: backlinko.com). Given the social nature of our platform, this could be challenging to influence. We will highlight some aspects of our choices which do contribute to a better rank.



Forcing a secure connection



While the online trend for more emphasis on secure browsing has grown for many years now, it has only been up until December 2015 that Google had officially announced to highly appreciate websites that force all users over HTTPS, or secure, connections. inSided communities have already done so for many years, helping their SERP ranks forward.



Optimized page titles



For end-users and search crawlers alike, naming content on the internet properly is of the highest importance for effective use. A clear, descriptive page title will not only support proper indexation and ranking on the SERP, but will also drive click-through rates (CTR). The inSided platform allows for two variants to page titles: those of generic pages (such as the community homepage) and all others regarding variable content (category sets and topics).



Generic page titles can be altered as phrases in the Control Environment (CE). For variable content, page titles will be automatically adapted, and updated if changed, using the category set or topic title. Usually, those titles will then also be appended by the generic community title.



Semantic/clean URL slugs



As with variable page content, titles are also adapted automatically into the URL slug – and will be updated as well if any changes are made to the content. The slug is the descriptive end part of the address, making it easy and “clean” to read. For example, a topic on the TomTom forums titled “Changes to Terms and Conditions”, started in the category set called “How to use the forum”, has been given the URL: https://en.discussions.tomtom.com/how-to-use-the-forum-35/changes-to-terms-and-conditions-1014658



External links



A community is organically built on millions of user interactions, consisting of posts with rich text and media. This often includes external (or “outbound”) web anchors, created through BBcode in posts and articles. These are all implicit invitations for a crawler to follow, leading it to all kinds of websites – good and bad. And while users can easily make the distinction between user-generated and editorial content, for a crawler this isn’t always as clear.



As an effect, the quality of external links could be of influence to the community’s overall rank, regardless of who has posted them and in what context. To reduce the risk for a negative judgment when bad links are involved, the community platform will prevent crawlers from evaluating external links by adding a “nofollow" attribute to all of them. By doing this, the value for commercial spammers abusing the community is also largely reduced.



Migrating communities to inSided



If your community migrates from another software vendor to inSided, search engines will surely notice variations to the URL structures and should quickly adapt. Specially crafted migration scripts by inSided will provide for all old and important content links to be automatically redirected for any visitor and crawlers, using HTTP 301 status codes (“moved permanently”). Usually, these changes can already be seen in search indexes within one or two days, with the entire platform’s indexation being adapted in weeks’ time.



In terms of ranking, spiders like those of Google will want to determine if all content has been preserved. Because all existing community content will, most likely, be migrated fully into the new platform, established ranks within the search engine usually do not vary significantly due to the migration alone. Often times, the ranking will even increase, due to modern templating techniques and other influences which are discussed in this document (e.g. proper semantics, navigation, meta information). These technical advantages will be complemented with the help of your community consultant, to ensure content is created and maintained in an optimal way.

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Hi Inspired, 

 

I have a relevant question here, as we look to take steps to boost forum content which is ranking a bit lower then we’d like. 

 

Metadata and improving the info available to crawlers: how do we do this? I am a bit of an SEO novice, but we’re using an analytics tool called Conductor, which displays what Google sees as headers, H2s, H3 etc. Well some of the info Google is getting from our page’s source code isn’t great. 

 

Example here:

 

 

Is it possible, is it realistic, to go about making this more accurate? What about meta data for images?

 

As you can imagine with thousands of topics, one has to strike a balance between time, effort and reward. So keen to hear what others do with this. 

Any advice on this would be appreciated, thoughts @bjoern_schulze?

Tim

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