SEO Searchable? Starting a New Forum for Company Community
-
Hi Mozzers,
I'm new here and am looking forward to learning from this awesome group of SEOs
As my company's Web Optimization Manager, I'm in charge of just about anything SEO related. We are an education company and we are looking to build a new forum so students (both new and old) and continue interacting within our community.
We also want to use this as a tool for new users and potential new customers through search (obviously). We are in an internal debate as to how we should make the forums and the implications on search it may have. Some managers want the content available only to members, others want the content read-only to the public, and the tech team building the forum says that "it'll be an issue making the content available to the public without a log-in." So my questions are:
(1) Will we still be searchable if we make our content "read-only" for non-members? Members will have the ability to log-in and comment and post etc (similar to this forum).
(2) Will be searchable if we make the content completely private and available only to members. What I mean by private is perhaps, we'll make the title of the forum thread public but not the actual responses. Along these lines, what would happen if we made everything private (including the tite). Will Google still pick up on our content in a search result and a potential user only not be able to see anything?
(3) What would you all suggest to make this flow the right way?
Hope to hear from you all soon. Thanks
-
My guess is that it would either be a setting or a plugin for your forum script of choice.
Basically, it would consider googlebot a logged in user and display all the forum threads/replies.
-
Thanks, Oleg!
How do you make something viewable to googlebot but not viewers? I am still a young SEO afterall!
Anyone else?
-
Few things you can do.
-
As long as Google can index the text, it will appear in the SERPs. So making it read only is fine.
-
If you just show the title to Google, that's all that will be indexed. You'll probably be missing out on a bunch of long tail keywords and quality content from the conversations.
-
Make the content viewable to googlebot but not viewers. That way you get your privacy and let Google know about the conversations going on within.
Note: Non-members can still view the content via Google's cached version of the page but most people don't know about that feature. They also wouldn't be able to post from the cached copy.
Cheers,
Oleg -
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is Prerender.io/React going to negatively impact our SEO efforts?
On any page on the site (https://theadventurepeople.com/), the same short code appears. Having investigated Google index pages, Google's cache and Fetch & Render, it does look like Google can view the content and index it, but we're not 100% convinced. Background technical information from the web developer: The website is a single page application built using React. The site is setup with Prerender: https://prerender.io/ (which renders the javascript in a browser, saves the static HTML, and returns that to crawlers). Is Prerender.io/React going to negatively impact our SEO efforts?
Web Design | | Wagada0 -
Any new tips on how to speed up re-listing after re-design?
A few things around re-designing an older but well performing site for search and retaining/ improving SEO value. Lots of effort has been put into content marketing and optimising individual pages on this site, it has a lot of links coming in from well-respected sites (but the domain name will remain the same so that shouldn't be an issue) so I'm very anxious about how the redesign will effect ranking, although the new site will be far more user friendly, beautiful, responsive where the old one is not and faster to load. Would really like to avoid the search engine drop when the site first goes live if at all possible- One idea on this was to make the new site live on another domain - .co.uk for example, whilst keeping the old site up on the .com for a month or so, then switching the records so the new site is then visible on .com and the .co.uk redirects to it. Does this sound at all sensible?! Also any more advice on how best to ensure the new site will do better, not worse for search is hugely appreciated. We have cut a lot of content to make it more user friendly and easy to find information. We will be making sure all old links are redirected to new site (but as there are fewer pages on new site, will it matter if 5 old URLS point to one new URL for instance?) Also what's the difference between 301 and 302 redirects! Thank you so much in advance, massively appreciated your time!
Web Design | | Emjmoz0 -
SEO Audit for site redesign
I'm in the process of preparing my company's ecommerce site for a redesign - largely to move to a responsive design and improve issues with UI and some much-needed features. This is a very small ecommerce business (Less than $300K annually), and we have settled on Magento Community Edition for our platform. We understand it to be very "SEO" friendly, and its similar to our current platform - it gives us a lot of flexibility in design, and it appears scalable. While I am aware of our current sites shortcomings (from an SEO standpoint), I was wondering if I should employ an SEO person/company to do a pre/post redesign audit. I looked at the MOZ checklist, and ran my site through Hubspot and WooRanks free tools, and am aware of what they are reporting as SEO items to be fixed. As I am so small, I was wondering if an SEO audit in addition to what I already know might be overkill? Any thoughts/suggestions are welcome.
Web Design | | Artfx1 -
Do pull quotes affect SEO positively or negatively?
I like the design element of a pull quote to ad interest and highlight an important point. If I use an exact quote from the page in a pull quote on that page, does that negatively affect SEO as duplicate content? Are there formatting or tagging methods that could help pull quotes to boost SEO? For clarity, by "pull quote" I mean a stylized bit of text that floats on a page in such a way that the body text wraps around it. It is actual text (not text embedded in a graphic) but it behaves like an image with text wrapping around it. Here's an example (in red on the right side): http://www.21ct.com/resources/news-room/21ct-announces-its-latest-us-patent-for-advancing-big-data-security/
Web Design | | kyle21ct0 -
Changing design for a client. SEO concerns.
Hi there! A client requested me to change the look of his website entirely. It currently ranks #16 on Google with one of their main keywords. My problem is: The current site was made in a CMS I'm not familiar with and all of its pages urls are not SEO friendly (EX: http://www.mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=95). It is the first time I have come up with this situation so I would appreciate any tips or links to useful information. I tried searching in SEOmoz and came up with nothing. I'm sure this is a common problem though. Since they want a static website, for starters their page extensions will change from .php to .html I'm not 100% sure but I think this will be a problem for their current ranking in Google. Any ideas? Edit: I forgot to mention that all of the backlinks this site has points to their hompage as www.mysite.com, I guess this is good.
Web Design | | Eblan0 -
What are some good places to read about SEO with Joomla CMS?
I recently was asked by a potential client to work with them on Joomla based website. I very rarely come across people with Joomla based websites and am struggling to find good resources outside of Joomla's own community site. At this point, I am not very comfortable working with them on Joomla. Any tips or advice?
Web Design | | GCSMasone0 -
What site do you admire/like for its SEO - technical, content, whatever - and why?
I am gathering examples of great SEO'd sites and would appreciate your examples. The rationale can be anything - great SEO structure, great linking, solid content - you think stands out. Thank you!
Web Design | | josh-riley0 -
Technical SEO Question about TLD combined with SubDomain
I am making a new website but need to figure out the best way to do this in terms of SEO. I would like the website to have functionality of brochure website combined with an online store. My issue is that I will be using software called prestashop for my online store and CMS called MODx to develop my brochure site. (These can not be combined into one CMS). I can create brochure site with MOdx = www.example.com & then from that a subdomain using prestashop for my online store = store.example.com Can I get Google to index these as one site or would I be better off trying to get everything under the TLD. Ideally I would like just one site without subdomain Bacially what I am asking is... What are the effects of having subdomains in terms of SEO? Am I better of having everyhitng under TLD? Can I get Google to view TLD and Sub as one site? Hope this makes sense, thank you.
Web Design | | Socialdude0