Khoros community is a web platform that hosts and displays User Generated Content (UGC). To improve its SEO, the Khoros community platform optimizes the HTML source code of the platform and provides provisions for community admins/managers to enhance community SEO.
Khoros community adopts the following best practices for on-page SEO and technical SEO.
Meta Tags
- Meta title tag: Khoros platform automatically embeds meta title tags from user generated post titles. Further, it enables you to override SEO titles for Forums, Blogs, and TKBs so content writers or admins can create user friendly SEO titles.
- Meta description tag: Khoros’ platform
- automatically embeds meta description tags for each message post.
- provides the ability to create SEO descriptions for Forums, Blogs, and TKBs, thus, enabling customers to create relevant keyword stuffed descriptions that can be shown on Google SERP page.
Khoros platform also provides an option to define maximum length for the Meta description in Admin console:
Admin → System→ SEO
- Meta Open Graph tags for social media: Khoros’ platform automatically embeds OG tag values: title, type, description, image for message posts.
- Meta viewport tags: Khoros’ platform automatically generates viewport meta tags for every community page. Defining viewport can improve your site’s mobile experience and the speed with which the page loads.
- Meta robots tag: Meta robots tags instruct the crawler how to index or follow the pages. As recommended by Google, Khoros platform automatically “no indexes” all thin/no content or irrelevant pages. For example, Khoros platform uses meta robots tags and explicitly prevents indexing of badge pages, profile pages, tag pages, Kudos message pages, etc.
Other SEO Attributes
- Alt tags: Alt tags provide better context to search engine crawlers for proper indexing. Khoros platform automatically generates alt tags for images and videos. For example, the caption inputted for images/videos is taken as “alt description”.
- Canonicalization: On Khoros platform, the permalinks of replies/comments are canocalized to the Main post page, thus preventing duplicity in indexing the content. Even printer friendly pages and bookmarked pages are canocalized to the main post page. Learn more about canonicalization.
- URL design: Khoros platform uses keyword-enriched URLs. The post slug (post slug is a user friendly part of the URL that comes after the top level domain. For eg; the bold portion of this URL is a post slug https://hobbes3-aws.qa.lithium.com/t5/Customer-Support/Mobile-Phone-issues-Troubleshooting/m-p) generated from the user content is separated by hyphens (which is recommended by Google). Post slug normally contains discussion title or topic title. The length of these can be set from the Admin portal.
Further, Khoros enables use of lowercase letters in URL. If the config is turned on, the entire post slug is generated in lower case. This helps prevent the creation of duplicate URLs. As a best practice, URL should be in lower case.
Admin → System→ SEO
- Schema.org: Presently, Khoros platform generates schema for forum pages link. Khoros platform enables Q&A structured data for forum pages.
- Sitemaps: Khoros platform automatically generates a sitemap for the community when it is created. Further, there is already a config for it. Khoros platform provides 2 types of sitemaps: Node or threaded. Node type site map is already enabled by default and is recommended for larger communities
Khoros also provides the capability to update the sitemap in Admin.
Admin → System→ SEO
- Robots.txt: Khoros platform enables users to include links in the Robots.txt file. Thus, any number of links can be excluded from crawling in robots.txt. The provision is given to the user under Advanced tab in Studio.
Studio → Advanced → Robots Editor
In addition Khoros’ platform uses the “rel” attribute to prevent certain external links being crawled. External links are automatically defined as rel = “no follow” so as to avoid passing any link equity.
In case, user does not want “no follow” for certain links, then he/she can define them in the Admin portal under the following config:
Admin → System→ SEO
