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
-
Migration from HTML to Wordpress - SEO Implications?
I am in the process of having a wordpress site developed to replace my current HTML site. (I currently have my website in html and a blog in wordpress in a sub directory). I am doing this in phases to try and preserve as much of my good rankings as possible. My first phase is to replicate my site with the exact same pages, meta data, and site structure. I'm hoping that google will see this as not much change and not change my rankings for the worse. I also made it a goal that my site speed tests be at least equal to what they are now. We will have to 301 all of the URLs however since it will be going from /example.html to /example. I believe my blog will also need to move into the root directory as well, so I need to 301 all of those pages. I plan to wait a couple months for Phase 2. Phase 2 involves replacing old content (photo galleries), and introducing new content (virtual tours, videos, new pages, etc.) One of my reasons for moving to wordpress is to keep up with current trends a little easier since I have very little time. (I am owner, website maintainer, SEO - all on my own). My question here is three parts. 1. Do you think this strategy will work to preserve my current rankings? 2. Do you have any lessons learned or advice to share with me to make this as smooth as possible? 3. Do I really need to wait to add new content? I might get antsy and want to do it sooner! 🙂 Thank you in advance!
Web Design | | CalicoKitty20001 -
Wordpress SEO/Tag plugin recommendation for sports (soccer) website
I own a Wordpress website which covers soccer in the DC MD VA area called DMV Soccer http://www.dmvsoccer.com/ We write weekly recaps where we tag a player who has scored a goal or performed well in a game. For each player, obviously, a tag is created. What I'm looking for is a plugin or solution that would allow me to tag a player, but also automatically assign a team to that player so that the team name and player's name are optimized on the individual player's tag page. So if I were to tag George Murphy on a recap, and I assign him to a team, let's say DC United. The tag page would have a title, something like: George Murphy Soccer Player for DC United and the meta description: George Murphy, soccer player from MD who players for DC United archives Or something similar, if that makes sense. Should I skip using tags and instead start assigning each player as a sub-category under each team? I'd like to try to avoid that, because not each category will be based on a player. Any suggestions in terms of existing plugins or other recommendations?
Web Design | | georgetsn1 -
How to Redirect Old Domain to a New Domain?
One of my clients has chosen a new domain for her website so we will redirect the old domain to the new. I understand that once redirected, most of the authority built up over the years for the old domain will pass through to the new domain. Is this correct? Can this be done through the Wordpress dashboard, say with a plugin perhaps? I have a plugin called 404 Redirected I was going to try to use for this purpose. Finally, the client has other domains (5 total) she has used for one reason or another. She wants to consolidate all of them and have everything redirected to her new domain. Do you see any downside to this in terms of crawling, Google trust and authority? I know there are some user experience issues to deal with, but we're addressing those. I just don't want to do anything that may cause Google not to trust the new domain. Thanks, Dino
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Will keyword optimization for a landing page impact SEO for subsequent pages?
For example, if I optimize keyword “pleurx” really well on our landing page, I'd like to know if subsequent
Web Design | | Todd_Kendrick
pages linking back to that landing page will rank higher than before for “pleurx”
even if “pleurx” wasn't optimized on the subsequent pages. Thanks! -Andrew0 -
Confluence and SEO
I think this is a difficult question so apologies in advance and any help would be appreciated! We currently have a large amount of support center content sitting on our main pages which we don’t think is very effective (mainly basic how to guides). We think it is difficult for visitors to understand and the UI is very poor. In order to solve this we’re currently moving this content onto a subdomain using Confluence, a wiki based team collaboration tool (from a company called Atlassian). What we’re planning on doing is very much like what Atlassian themselves have done on this page: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/Atlassian+Documentation What are the SEO issues / dangers that I need to consider before moving this content? I’m assuming that as this content will still be on the same domain then we can minimise link equity / authority loss by setting up re-directs to the new content. Also, has anyone had any experience of using Confluence and whether individual pages can be optimised for SEO? I notice that there are lots of add-ins that can be used, one of which is an SEO add-on which allows you to customise things like meta description tags.
Web Design | | RG_SEO0 -
Home page redirect - will this cause an SEO problem
Hello, We are using Wordpress to build a wiki site. The wiki plugin we're using (Wordpress Wiki lite) can only be set up on an internal page like nlpwiki(dot)org/wiki Can we redirect the home page to the /wiki subdirectory and use nlpwiki(dot)org/wiki as our home page? I've never done that, just wondering if it will be indexed as the home page or if there are any connonical issues. Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
SEO tricks for a one page site with commented html content
Hi, I am building a website that is very similar to madebysofa.com : means it is one page site with entire content loaded (however are commented in html) and by clicking on sections it modify the DOM to make specific section visible. It is very interesting from UX point of view but as far as I know, since this way most of my content is always commented and hidden from crawlers, I will loose points regarding SEO. Is there any workaround you can recommend or you think sites like madebysofa.com are doomed to loose SEO points by nature? Best regards,
Web Design | | Ashkan10 -
Can SEO Moz perform a full site crawl and provide a report showing all URLs within an existing domain?
We are conducting a site redesign and need to get an idea of all pages that are out there on our domain (in some report fashion). This would help for discovery and cleanup as we re-work the site and move to a new CMS. Thanks
Web Design | | DCondon0