Sitemap strategy question

[kgroneman]

I have a strategy question to run by you.  I was reading THIS ARTICLE in the best practices center.  Under the “What is a Sitemap and why is it valuable?” section I see this:

The Lithium Sitemap uses a single sitemap domain (/sitemap.xml) for both threaded- and node-level sitemaps. For node-level granularity, crawlers are fed the basic skeleton of the community structure rather than a map to every post and reply. When thread-level granularity is enabled, the sitemap includes a link to a threaded file to which crawlers are redirected. Lithium also supports sitemaps for images and videos.

Note: Faster crawl time is good, so large communities with many boards and deep threads tend to benefit from node-level sitemaps. Smaller communities get a bigger net benefit from pointing to specific threads. In most cases, node-level is a fine starting point, which is why it is enabled by default. Thread-level sitemaps tend to be a good solution for communities where content moves around a lot or there’s a lot of daily activity.

I can’t see what we’re on in our configuration (??) but I assume node level as it’s the default.   We do have a lot of boards, but our content does have a lot of daily activity so it really doesn't fit the suggestion above conveniently. I’m wondering if we should be on thread level sitemap?  Opinions?

@AmyH 

[kgroneman]

By the way Khoros, when I posted that, I selected indent for the quoted text and it told me I had invalid HTML and stripped out theindent  so you have a mismatch between your HTML permissions here and the options in the menu bar.   I'm just sayin.......

[Wendy_S]

I know @Chao might have some best practices to share here as our HP Community Seo person. 😊

[kgroneman]

@Wendy_S  do you know which sitemap option you guys are using?  Node or thread level?

[Wendy_S]

Our Spanish community is on a thread level site map. But I don't think we have noticed a huge difference.

Wonder about how you measure the effectiveness of it.🤔

[kgroneman]

FYI I talked to our account rep who talked to the Khoros SEO guru "Chetna" who basically said there is no right or wrong on this.   Between the SEO guru, our accouint rep, and our TAM & thier collegues, this is what she said:

"I was told that the general consensus was that given the size of your community, you should make the move to threaded sitemap. "

So that's what we did.  I guess time will tell if it makes a difference.  - Kim

[Wendy_S]

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@kgroneman wrote:

FYI I talked to our account rep who talked to the Khoros SEO guru "Chetna" who basically said there is no right or wrong on this.   Between the SEO guru, our accouint rep, and our TAM & thier collegues, this is what she said:

"I was told that the general consensus was that given the size of your community, you should make the move to threaded sitemap. "

So that's what we did.  I guess time will tell if it makes a difference.  - Kim

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We had the same experience. Not seeing a huge difference to both approaches.

Thanks for sharing!

[NoorS]

This is a nice post. 

Hi @kgroneman @Wendy, I am new PM for Search and SEO. I am looking for enhancements on these products. Please let me know if you have additional inputs.

[Fellsteruk]

Hi @NoorS  the ability to manage what content is excluded from crawers within admin or the front end would be a plus, I create a lot of standalone pages and its a pain to have to add them to robot.txt then do a push, would be great if we could manage that in admin and or have a tick box on content to prevent being crawled. 

I'd also like to see more use of google structured data markup as standard out the box. 

[NoorS]

Thanks @Fellsteruk... I am always lookind forward to such suggestions. I am definitely going to consider this and will come back as we finalize the feature roadmap...

You may reach out to me in case of additional inputs

[NoorS]

Hi @Fellsteruk , PLz let me know if you have tried an option to edit robots.txt in Studio. This feature enables you to exclude links that you dont want crawler to navigate. Please let me know

[Fellsteruk]

Thanks @NoorS yeah im aware of that tool and it does work its just a challenge as my content team dont have access to studio and due to constant dev in my environment its not easy to just deploy a change. Ideally a content designer/editor should be able to control SEO of the content within the front end and ideally excluding from SEO would be included in that. 

[StanGromer]

 @NoorS - I’ll piggyback on this and ask a more general question - Is there plans to update and/or provide more information on SEO in the future, tools, best practices?

Every QBR we have, Khoros flags SEO as an opportunity for us, but then can never provide any actual guidance or assistance to improve it, so it’s become a two year running joke internally on our team, so I am hopeful hearing you are owning SEO there may be improvements coming in this area?

This would be a huge area, at least in my view, where your customers could use some help.  Judging by other responses in this thread though, it could be across the board everyone could use better help?

[NoorS]

Hi @Fellsteruk ,

I will evaluate this and see if it is a compelling ask among our other customers and will circle back on this. 

Thanks

[NoorS]

Hi @StanGromer, there is definitely something in the pipeline. Let me come back to you next week to provide more visibility to this.

I am analysing some of our Best SEO practices and hopefully will provide you concrete information next week 🙂

Thanks

[Fellsteruk]

@StanGromer just come out of a QBR and same was flagged, ive asked for some examples of how to improve will share what i get 

[rose_cobb]

@NoorS There is definitely a case for this! Segmenting SEO writing across Production and Stage makes for a dizzying experience. It would be nice to have all of that on the front-end, since that is where most of the SEO updates take place already. 

@Fellsteruk , @StanGromer Thanks for keeping this conversation alive. The current trend for communities is to un-gate access, and if Khoros is trying to position itself has a platform with CMS capabilities it needs to develop its SEO offerings for customers. Just my two cents. 😉 

[Fellsteruk]

Hey @rose_cobb,

I think it's fair to say the Khoros community platform "right now" whilst technically a CMS it's not on par with other CMS platforms but i think its key to keep in mind that khoros is a community platform first and a CMS 2nd. 
That said and i dont have timescales but i believe, from conversations ive had there is a project to give us a bit of a step change on the platform which would give us more access to edit pages in a CMS style without the need to do dev in stage and push every five mins. 

Half the traffic on my community are consuming non UGC, just plain content, im pushing the platform pretty hard to work as a CMS making use of TKB and do struggle with bits n bobs but i think these new "CMS type" changes they are working on will make both our lives easier 🙂 

[NoorS]

Hi @rose_cobb - Sure, We can consider the idea of having SEO additions on front end or on Admin. This also requires larger discussion. We will definitely evaluate this.  🙂