Forum Discussion

markgraham's avatar
markgraham
Contributor
14 years ago

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of (new) MB posts

I am thinking about how to best ensure that all of our MB posts are indexed by Google/Bing.

One idea is to submit new XML sitemaps, daily, that contain (only) URLs for all the new posts made in the previous 24 hours.

Two questions:

1) What do others think of this idea?  (I have used this approach with another MB platform with good results.)

2) What REST API request might I use to extract a full list of search optimized URLs for posts made in the last 24 hours?

Any/all/other ideas and suggestions are welcomed.

Thanks!

 

- Mark

  • davidtwamley's avatar
    davidtwamley
    Expert
    14 years ago

    Mark and I had a great phone call yesterday. He is managing a much larger community than mine and made a very good case for using sitemap.xml for getting new forum posts indexed more quickly. It serves a similar purpose to blog pinging, only for forums. Plus, Mark had success with this approach in the past.

     

    For part 2 of your question regarding the rest call. I started another post, List urls for posts made in the last 24 hours in the Everything Studio board. Lithium gurus have been doling out a lot of REST info over there lately.

     

    Jake, thanks for the static sitemap.xml tip. We get ours tonight!

     

    • JakeR's avatar
      JakeR
      Khoros Oracle
      14 years ago
      David, I'm glad it is working out for you on the static sitemap, but I definitely want to get the dynamic one that both you and Mark are talking about into our product. *fingers crossed*

      I also see that the thread you started on "posts in the last 24 hours" was answered by AdamT. Win. :)

      And last but not least, it is great to have you over here. For as good as it is for Lithium folks to be answering questions, I'd like think that your participation is HUGE in getting us to not only push the product further, but also to disseminate shared knowledge.
  • JakeR's avatar
    JakeR
    Khoros Oracle
    14 years ago

    Welcome to the Lithosphere, Mark. 🙂

     

    The good news is that we try to make our software instances fairly SEO friendly.  For example, you'll note that our URLs in a thread are canonical (and describing the subject) rather than a bunch of query string parameters.

     

    In the page markup you'll also note that we use a lot of rel=nofollow tags around links that people post in their messages.  That way, the spiders dont see messages as just a bunch of link-farming initiatives.  Conversely, we have a toggle in our blogs so that a trusted blog author does not have the rel=nofollow tag applies to the links that he or she provides in their article (because a blog author's links are considered trustworthy).

     

    You can read more about our SEO approach here:

     

    http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Growing-Successful-Communities/Understanding-SEO-Friendly-URLs/ta-p/6560

     

    and learn more about what we recommend here:

    https://community.khoros.com/t5/Search-tools/Optimizing-your-page-preview-for-SEO/ta-p/309293

     

    But going a bit deeper into your questions, there are some limitations as well as possibilities with what you're asking about:

     

    1.  We can host a static sitemap for you without any problems, but the application cannot generate a dynamic one for you.

     

    2.  The REST API call that would extract a list of threads for posts made in the last 24 hours would be one from the Community Class and the threads/recent Method.  The arguments that you can use are for how many pages are listed though, and not by date or time.  Through some coding (and perhaps making a couple of calls), you can arrive at this list.

     

    Hope all of this info helps.