Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Help FORUM ( User generated content ) SEO best practices
-
Hello Moz folks !
For the very first time im dealing with a massive community who rely on UGC ( user generated content ). Their forum is finding a great deal of duplicate content/broken link/ duplicate title and on-site issue. I have Advance SEO knowledge related to ecommerce or blogging but new to forum and UGC.
I would really love to learn or get ressources links that would allow me to see/understand the best practices in term of SEO. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Best,
Yan
-
do logged in-user and anonymous user should have the same behavior ?
For the most part, yes, however it depends on the forum you are running. The important piece to understand is that whatever is hidden behind a login wall, remains hidden to the search engines. So, you have to weigh that factor when deciding which content to display to everyone versus the content to display to only logged in users.
How do you suggest handling canonical in a UGC world ?
Canonicalization isn't too hard to manage. Your forum software should include canonical URLs, but if not you will want those implemented into the template as soon as possible. The use of the rel=prev and rel=next tags are highly recommended. This allows you to keep the main forum thread as the canonical URL and Google understands that the subsequent pages are related to the main page and how they add value.
Do you have specific editorial guidelines enforced on UGC ?
Again, that's up to you and your community. What work editorially for one forum may not be the most desirable for another (e.g. the use of profanity). As long as the content being added is of value, then I consider it good content. With forums, you can be a lot more loose with the guidelines and allow users to interact as they desire.
Don't let your forum become infested with Spam, obvious self-promoting threads, and make sure all links are nofollow. Many forums implement restrictions on users in regards to links and only when they prove themselves can they add links to their posts. Link and Spam management are very important for forums.
-
Thanks Ray-PP,
Is there any specific ? Exemple , do logged in-user and anonymous user should have the same behavior ? How do you suggest handling canonical in a UGC world ? Do you have specific editorial guidelines enforced on UGC ? Exemple should we noindex a post with a 3 word question and an image ?
Cheers,
Yan
-
Hello Yan,
Fortunately, the on-site SEO for UGC is not very different from the on-site SEO of other forms of content. We can still apply those best-practices to the forums and UGC you're experiencing in forums.
Duplicate content / on-page factors
- Make sure the forum is using proper canonicalization
- use of rel=prev/next for paginated threads
- Semantic SEO where appropriate
- Make sure to have all on-page SEO factors optimized (title, headings, images optimized, ect)
Broken links
- Use Moz or a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to identify 404 pages. Redirect any important pages with a 301 to its nearest related page (save SEO authority for the important dead pages).
Are there more specific issues you are experiencing with the forum?
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
-
Best way to "Prune" bad content from large sites?
I am in process of pruning my sites for low quality/thin content. The issue is that I have multiple sites with 40k + pages and need a more efficient way of finding the low quality content than looking at each page individually. Is there an ideal way to find the pages that are worth no indexing that will speed up the process but not potentially harm any valuable pages? Current plan of action is to pull data from analytics and if the url hasn't brought any traffic in the last 12 months then it is safe to assume it is a page that is not beneficial to the site. My concern is that some of these pages might have links pointing to them and I want to make sure we don't lose that link juice. But, assuming we just no index the pages we should still have the authority pass along...and in theory, the pages that haven't brought any traffic to the site in a year probably don't have much authority to begin with. Recommendations on best way to prune content on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages efficiently? Also, is there a benefit to no indexing the pages vs deleting them? What is the preferred method, and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline0 -
Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective
Hi All, I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this. We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer. We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers. What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products. Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B. The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm. Hope someone can help! Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU1 -
Does anyone know of any tools that can help split up xml sitemap to make it more efficient and better for seo?
Hello All, We want to split up our Sitemap , currently it's almost 10K pages in one xml sitemap but we want to make it in smaller chunks splitting it by category or location or both. Ideally into 100 per sitemap is what I read is the best number to help improve indexation and seo ranking. Any thoughts on this ? Does anyone know or any good tools out there which can assist us in doing this ? Also another question I have is that should we put all of our products (1250) in one site map or should this also be split up in to say products for category etc etc ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Best practice for retiring old product pages
We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Duplicate Content www vs. non-www and best practices
I have a customer who had prior help on his website and I noticed a 301 redirect in his .htaccess Rule for duplicate content removal : www.domain.com vs domain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnvoyWeb
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com/$1 [R=301,L,NC] The result of this rule is that i type MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com in the browser and it redirects to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com I wonder if this is causing issues in SERPS. If I have some inbound links pointing to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some pointing to MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, I would think that this rewrite isn't necessary as it would seem that Googlebot is smart enough to know that these aren't two sites. -----Can you comment on whether this is a best practice for all domains?
-----I've run a report for backlinks. If my thought is true that there are some pointing to www.www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some to the www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, is there any value in addressing this?0 -
E-commerce site, one product multiple categories best practice
Hi there, We have an e-commerce shopping site with over 8000 products and over 100 categories. Some sub categories belong to multiple categories - for example, A Christmas trees can be under "Gardening > Plants > Trees" and under "Gifts > Holidays > Christmas > Trees" The product itself (example: Scandinavian Xmas Tree) can naturally belong to both these categories as well. Naturally these two (or more) categories have different breadcrumbs, different navigation bars, etc. From an SEO point of view, to avoid duplicate content issues, I see the following options: Use the same URL and change the content of the page (breadcrumbs and menus) based on the referral path. Kind of cloaking. Use the same URL and display only one "main" version of breadcrumbs and menus. Possibly add the other "not main" categories as links to the category / product page. Use a different URL based on where we came from and do nothing (will create essentially the same content on different urls except breadcrumbs and menus - there's a possibiliy to change the category text and page title as well) Use a different URL based on where we came from with different menus and breadcrumbs and use rel=canonical that points to the "main" category / product pages This is a very interesting issue and I would love to hear what you guys think as we are finalizing plans for a new website and would like to get the most out of it. Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arikbar0 -
Best way to de-index content from Google and not Bing?
We have a large quantity of URLs that we would like to de-index from Google (we are affected b Panda), but not Bing. What is the best way to go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Will having image lightbox with content on a web page SEO friendly?
This website is done in CMS. Will having lightbox pop up with content be SEO friendly? If you go to the web page and click on the images at the bottom of the page. There are lightbox that will display information. Will these lightbox content information be crawl by Google? Will it be consider as content for the url http://jennlee.com/portfolio/bran.. Thanks, John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VizionSEO990