Nulumia
Well-known member
I'd like to offer an in depth look at the upcoming public launch of SEO & Index tools, an extremely powerful addon which has been in development for over a year.
One important disclaimer:
Author's Note
I have been working in the SEO space for over 10 years, with much experience in contractual management of SEO campaigns, traffic monitoring, on-site technical improvement, and even site speed optimization. I've been through the trenches of white-hat and black-hat bulletin boards, webmaster forums and other sites dedicated to solving Google's ever perplexing algorithm roll-outs.Further, I have deep understanding of technical/on-page SEO, from everything down to the nitty gritty of "alt" attributes to how link "title" tags pass Page Rank (PR) onto URLs.
With this background, SEO & Index Tools aims to be the most powerful and advanced SEO addon for Xenforo, hands down. Virtually every idea and method collected from years of experience has been going into this product, with no shortcuts taken.
Overview
This addon is not a "meta title and description" hack, it is not checkbox to index content or not, or anything other that targets one type of content on Xenforo. It is a comprehensive and deep-reaching system which affects all manner of on-site technical SEO across nearly all types of content, pages, and entities on Xenforo.What are the major features?
- Powerful indexing management with advanced rules & criteria
- Meta tags with Google snippet previews
- Open Graph management
- Page title formatting
- Image and link tag management, alt and title attributes
- rel="nofollow" handling
- Deep 3rd-party support for addons and other systems
- Recommendations
Index Management
This is SEO & Index Tool's most powerful functionality with over a year's evolution and work. It adds deep control, rules and criteria to all different kinds of content in Xenforo, with category inheritance.What is indexing?
Search engine indexing is whether or not pages are included in search results, such as in Google or Bing, or blocked to these search engines. "Noindexing" a page means it will not be included in search results. It also affects your site's ranking and search placement.
Why should you "index" or "noindex" content?
Typically, you don't want "junk" content or pages which offer no valuable text content or keywords, to be shown in Google. Rather, the goal is to only include valuable pages which you want people to click to visit your site. Think threads, your homepage, useful articles, etc. If a user makes a @#$%-post about "Look at this funny cat", chances are you don't want this in Google search results!
Can indexing affect my site's rank?
This is complicated, but YES! At the very simplest, by including tons of junk URLs in your search results, you're diluting the authority & positioning of your important pages. This can ultimately affect the overall Domain Authority of your website itself.
By blocking search engines to junk pages via the "noindex" or "nofollow" directives, you theoretically should cause a bump in the rank of your important content.
Why the need for powerful indexing in Xenforo? Does this already affect me?
By using Xenforo, the answer is already yes. This is not a knock or slight against Xenforo which is a fantastic system, but by nature the platform can produce countless low-value URLs and redirects which can and should be blocked from search engines. Is this a problem with Xenforo? Not really. Remember that the standpoint of this addon is from a hyper-aggressive and in-depth approach to technical SEO, for site owners looking for that power and control. I don't personally believe such an aim rests on Xenforo as a general community platform, especially when so many of these SEO decisions should ultimately be on a case-by-case basis.
Brand New Indexing System
Right now in Xenforo, we have the ability to noindex threads and posts based on either a toggle "Allow" or "Deny", or by setting some criteria such as "Thread is X days old", "Reaction score", etc. That's it. And outside of threads, there is no further control over indexing our site's content across all manner of pages.SEO & Index Tools introduces an incredibly in-depth system for index management. First, let's see how it overhauls Xenforo's thread indexing - so it will make sense when explaining how this system extends to other parts of Xenforo!
First, index settings and criteria have been migrated off the 'Forum' entity and onto the 'Node' entity itself, which means other type of nodes such as Categories and Pages are now affected! This alone has huge benefit. Not only can you control indexing of category pages, but the indexing of all content under the category (including subforums) by setting criteria on the category itself! Further, you can noindex Page nodes, which is very crucial for sites with many custom pages for non-forum based content.
Setting criteria on the category? Yup, that means INHERITANCE
I'm personally a big fan of Xenforo's nested set functionality, and use it in several addons. Nested set allows settings for certain Xenforo entities to be extended down child items, such as forums, skipping only when there's a setting already made. A good example of this is "Override style ID" for forums or categories, which extends down all the subforums.
I'm also a fan of automation and making things simple with addons, so index settings are now inherited. For example, you can simply set one of your top-level categories to "noindex", and it will affect all subforums, pages and threads within it! The same applies to whether you've set criteria, such as "Minimum reaction score". That criteria is also passed down the chain of nodes.
Seeing the index system visually:
For convenience, the addon shows the index rules for each node on the Admin -> Forums -> Nodes list:
As you can see, rules set at the category level are inherited unless given an explicit value.
So what else can we do here?
Extending the index criteria system
Firstly, I believe that the given criteria are not enough for proper SEO strategy (Minimum reaction score, thread is X days old etc). A new ruleset has been added, "Words per page", which is far more important than the available options:
What's more, you can even choose to count the total words per page from either the entire page (all posts counted together!) or by limiting from the first X posts of a thread. SEO & Index Tools will count the words from the message content of posts (not the overall page), after stripping BBCode and HTML tags.
Ok, so that's pretty cool. But what about if you have a large number of nodes? Don't worry, that's been handled.
Global forum criteria
I said that there's no shortcuts in this addon. And I hate performing repetitive tasks. So you will now have access to global forum indexing criteria which is set in the addon's options:
Now with these handy settings done, we can go back to our forums/nodes and find that there's a new option added, to use the global criteria!
This means that after installing the addon, you can simply set your global criteria and then assign all top-level categories to use this setting, effectively taking care of all your forums in a few clicks. No wasting time! There will likely even be a "Rebuild / assign global criteria" entry in the Tools section at release, to take care of this for you!
So we've looked at how indexing is overhauled and extended using the addon. But that's just the beginning..
And now for the big whammy
Once the overhauled index system was put in place, it has been extended to all other systems on Xenforo (including addons) that use hierarchical content and categories. Yes, this means Xenforo Media Gallery, Resource Manager, Product Manager, XenPorta, shout/chat addons, DragonByte eCommerce, and other systems.This includes the inheritance system, application of the criteria system onto these entities, category settings, etc, including the visualization of the index inheritance on Admin category listings.
Indexing for Resource Categories:
Criteria also mimics the forum settings, but takes into account differences for the content. For example, Media items will have "Minimum X words" taken from the media description, Products from their descriptions, etc.
But what if you apply pretty good index criteria, but there's still content which meets the rules that you don't want indexed? You can also manually control individual content from the mod menu! For example, here we change a single thread:
You can even manage this from the forum list using inline moderation!
Whether Media Gallery photos, products, resources or news articles, SEO & Index Tools applies its powerful indexing features across the board!
Managing indexing via options
You can also simply switch indexing on or off for various sections via the options page:
This feature alone can have enormous potential in reducing the amount of low SEO value URLs on your site, particularly when having a large number of members, product or resource update pages, etc.
The Google Snippet Live Preview
The next powerful feature in the addon is the live Google snippet preview, which shows an approximation of how your page will appear in search results, and updates as you type in the fields! By default, the preview will use the regular title and description for the content - whether a forum or category, resource category, XenPorta section.
The live preview also adds two optional fields to all supported content, an SEO meta title and description. This allows you to specify custom content to display in the <head> section of your page (which will be visible to Google and search results), while keeping the regular title and <h1> tag on your page for visitors.
Also, when entering text into the SEO fields, it will override the standard values!
View attachment Sequence 01.mp4
Further, you can supply a custom Open Graph image, which will display to the left of the Google snippet. And of course, several handy labels will change colors from green to red and alert you for optimal character count as you type!
Extending the Google Live Snippet across Xenforo
But in true fashion to this addon, it doesn't just work for threads. This feature has been extended everywhere where content can allow, including but not limited to the following:- Forums
- Pages
- Forum list
- XFRM overview
- XFRM categories & resources
- XFMG overview
- XFMG categories & media pages
- Chat/shout pages
- eCommerce software (XR Product Manager, DBTech eCommerce, XFA Marketplace etc)
- XenPorta overview, categories & articles
- XenMedio
- Other news/article addons
Page Title Formatting
A very important aspect of technical SEO and another focus of this addon, you can control the formatting of page titles by assigning categories, sections and custom suffixes. For example, let's say you have a thread called "My favorite books", and your Admin -> Basic Options -> Board Title is set to "All About Books - A Book Lover's Haven". Your page's <title> tag, along with the tab shown in your browser, would look like this:This can get a bit cumbersome when your site name is lengthy, and in fact uses a lot of character count and possibly keyword repetition in ALL of your page titles. For example, a handful of your threads could look like this:
With SEO & Index Tools, you can assign custom suffixes for each area of your site - and even inject the name of the category for SEO boost!
The live preview will show how your browser tab would appear. This can be very handy for using a shortened suffix when you want the page's title to take the most space, or showing the category name.
For example, we could change the thread from earlier to simply:
..or with the forum category..
Further, you can configure the options to limit the entire page title to a certain amount, ie 70 characters. This method is intelligent enough that it will retain the suffix while cropping the content title with ellipsis (...).
Remember, this addon is all about giving you FULL control.
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