Lithium communities have a well-designed URL structure, HTML constructs, and metadata that help search engines like Google understand content and direct users to it. We want to do everything we can to ensure that your community content is indexed for easy discovery.
A vibrant Lithium community with frequent updates and relevant content is designed to make sure that your content appears at the top of search results. We know, how critical content findability is to the business and health of your community. We have made significant investments in the past year into Lithium’s SEO-optimized platform, which does most of the heavy lifting to ensure that your rich content continues to bubble to the top of relevant searches.
2018 SEO Highlights
Crawling is the process by which search engines like Google discover your webpages. Indexing is the process that enables web pages relevant to those searches to get listed in the search results. To aid in these processes, we released several SEO-related features:
- Canonical URLs: Canonical URLs are set up when multiple pages have similar content. Search engines crawl the canonical URL pages more often than other similar pages. This year, we added canonical URLs for the following pages on the Lithium platform:
- TKB board (tkb-p) & Idea board (idb-p) pages, when they are sorted
- Login page, Registration page & Forgot password page, when they contain passed parameters
- Prevent crawling: Printer-friendly pages are disallowed to be crawled by search engines.
- Prevent indexing: Avoid pages with thins/no content from indexing.
- User badge page, Tag detail page, Blank compose style page, Search results page, /ratingdetailpage/ provide thin content and hence not submitted for indexing. These will not show up in search results.
- Login links that re-direct to SSO logins; no real SEO benefit in indexing these links which eventually takes the user to the SSO pages.
- Unique titles/descriptions for custom pages: When you want to create a community page that’s different from one of our pre-defined templates/quilts, you can create a custom page. Additionally, you can edit the text keys to define the title and description of this page to aid in SEO.
Previously, when you created a custom page that used variables to display content for different versions of the page, each version used the same title and description (e.g.:, when your custom page contains posts filtered by label-names in your community).
Starting with 18.10, you can define different titles and descriptions for each version of the page, which in turn can improve SEO for these pages. For example, you can use label names to set a specific SEO title and description for each variant of a custom page; more here.
- Rich google search results for forum pages: We adopted the latest Google Q&A Structured Data guidelines, describedhere in the 18.12 release. The responses to a forum topic will show in carousel format.
Note: 1. Google will not start showing this rich preview for forum topics from your community immediately. The new markup will increase the likelihood that Google will use a rich search results format. Read more about Google's structured data policies here.
2. Google released further change to this markup in Jan. We have incorporated the change, and the new markup will be effective 19.1 onwards.
As always, you can learn more about SEO settings in our documentation. Common questions about Lithium SEO and how to set SEO options are great places to start.
