Knowledge Base Article

About Aurora SEO

The appearance of your community pages in web search results is the first impression you make, an important factor in attracting more visitors to your site. As such, getting a higher place in search engine rankings is important. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a series of techniques you can use to improve your community's visibility and search engine ranking. Unlike paid search, SEO tunes your site to get the best results based on the ranking criteria used by various search engines.

Khoros offers the following on-page and technical SEO features to make your content SEO-friendly and drive more traffic to your site:

Custom metadata (SEO Title, Description, and Canonical URL)

Khoros Communities offers out-of-the-box SEO metadata, which you can optimize in your content (Blogs, Forums, Ideas, Events, and KBs) to attract more readers to your site. You can define these properties while creating any post in the community. Learn more about creating posts in various content types.

  • Add an effective SEO Title to your post that appears in the web search results. Note that a post’s Title is different from the SEO Title. The SEO Title appears only in the search results page and when people click the SEO Title link, they see the main Title of the post.
  • Add a short SEO Description about your post. The SEO Description appears below the title of the post in search results.
  • Add Canonical URL for your post when there are a group of duplicate pages for the same post. Canonical URLs act as the prime URL of the page and are indexed in the search engines. 

By default, Khoros Communities sets the SEO title and description for a post based on the post’s title and snippet of its content, if you explicitly don’t specify them yourself.

Admins and moderators can override the SEO titles, descriptions, and canonical URLs defined by authors with more SEO-friendly properties that are informative and drive more traffic to the content. Learn more about adding SEO specific titles, descriptions, and canonical URLs for posts.

To ensure that the metadata for your titles and descriptions is unique, Khoros enables you to append the topic ID of individual posts to your title and description metatags. This avoids duplication of the tags and improves search engine rankings. Learn more about avoiding duplication of content title and description meta tags.

Structured markup

By default, Khoros optimizes the forum discussions, blog posts, and knowledge base articles across the community to preview them as rich results on the search pages based on the engagement within the content. This preview helps people easily find the right information and drives more people to your site. The search results display the forum discussion with the relevant answers (replies to the discussion) as shown below:

  • If the forum discussion has a reply marked as an accepted solution, the search results display the reply as Top answer. Learn more about accepted solutions.
  • The other suggested answers are sorted based on the number of likes to the replies.

Robots.txt file

In Robots Exclusion Protocol (Robots.txt file), you can include the links that need to be excluded from the search crawling and indexing activity. Learn more about regulating content crawling using robots.txt.

Sitemap

To help search engines better understand your community site structure and crawl it more effectively, Aurora automatically generates a sitemap for each community when it is created.

This sitemap lists the URLs of all posts created within the community. It also has URLs of all the community category and board pages. If a sitemap exceeds 50,000 entries, Khoros splits the sitemap file into multiple files. Links to sitemap files are stored within a sitemap index file. The frequency at which the sitemap is generated for the community can also be configured based on how much your community grows and changes over time.

To enable the sitemap for your community and configure its refresh frequency, Contact Khoros Support. 

Canonicalization 

To avoid duplicate content that negatively impacts search indexing, by default, the permalinks of replies or comments are canonicalized to the main post page in the community. 

Keyword-enriched and user-friendly URLs

Using post slug, Khoros platform generates SEO-friendly URLs to enhance search rankings. In a URL, post slug is the unique part that comes after the top domain, which represents the specific post page (post title).

In the below sample URL, the post slug is highlighted in bold:

“https://community.example.com/discussions/customer-support/mobile-phone-issues-troubleshooting/1234”

The post slug is generated from the user content and keywords are separated by hyphen as shown in the above sample URL.

Meta open graph tags for social media

To provide a better look and feel of your content when shared in social media, Khoros platform automatically embeds Open Graph tag values: title, type, description, and image for the posts to be displayed on social media.

Domains exemptions from rel = “nofollow” attribute

Khoros platform uses the rel = “nofollow” attribute to prevent certain external links being crawled. However, you can override this default and add specific domain links you might want to make exceptions from this rule, such as any company-owned domains. Learn more about configuring rel = “nofollow” attribute set.

Heading Tags

The page title on blog posts, KB articles and forum discussions are added as H1 tags. This is to ensure that search engines understand the content of the pages while also improving the user experience and accessibility of these pages.

Updated 6 months ago
Version 17.0
communities aurora
moderation
Search & SEO