SEO Utilities 1.0.1

[JulianD]

JulianD submitted a new resource:

SEO Utilities - Various options to improve the SEO of your forum

This is an experimental addon - Comments, pull requests and suggestions are welcome.

By default XenForo includes in the Sitemap only the first URL of each thread regardless of the amount of pages in the thread. Various members of the XenForo community have been discussing the possibility to include into the Sitemap all the thread pages.

This addon adds two new features to help improve the search engine index coverage of your forum.:

• Thread start date per page...

Read more about this resource...

 

[BT10]

Thank you. Wonderful add-on and name

Maybe you can also implement some more features related to SEO as well.

Ex: add no-index to members pages. More ideas can be found through this deleted add-on: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/seo-seo2-deleted.141984/

 

[Chromaniac]

Just ran the sitemap generator manually. Here are my logs.
Just threads: 127,153
Threads+Pages: 152,089

I was expecting this number to be higher! But still pretty cool. Thanks for this addon!

Update. Just saw the sitemap xml file. Seems to be generated fine. Was wondering if it was possible to add the page date-time for the url of that page in sitemap (the date-time you are replacing in thread pages!). I wonder if that would change anything. But seems logical if fetching that is possible. Cheers.

Update: Just realized that sitemap file uses the last modification date for thread. So it is already accurate.

 

[JulianD]

Thank you. Wonderful add-on and name

Maybe you can also implement some more features related to SEO as well.

Ex: add no-index to members pages. More ideas can be found through this deleted add-on: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/seo-seo2-deleted.141984/

Thank you very much!! I will indeed review those suggestions!

Just ran the sitemap generator manually. Here are my logs.
Just threads: 127,153
Threads+Pages: 152,089

I was expecting this number to be higher! But still pretty cool. Thanks for this addon!

Update. Just saw the sitemap xml file. Seems to be generated fine. Was wondering if it was possible to add the page date-time for the url of that page in sitemap (the date-time you are replacing in thread pages!). I wonder if that would change anything. But seems logical if fetching that is possible. Cheers.

Update: Just realized that sitemap file uses the last modification date for thread. So it is already accurate.

Thanks for your comments, I'm glad everything is going as expected. If you notice any change in your SEO index coverage or ranking, please let us know!

 

[Chromaniac]

alright. went through the sitemap file once again and checked multiple threads. sitemap does not have all pages of most threads i checked. it seems to be giving up after adding around 30% of the pages. for instance, a thread with 25 pages only has 7 pages listed in the sitemap. just wanted to ping you about it.

 

[KSA]

Important to note that Google classifies only the main link. Posts link within a particular thread are treated like canonical URLs and therefore non-indexed.

 

[Chromaniac]

this addon is adding page links in sitemap not post links so it should be fine. pages have their own canonical link.

 

[JulianD]

alright. went through the sitemap file once again and checked multiple threads. sitemap does not have all pages of most threads i checked. it seems to be giving up after adding around 30% of the pages. for instance, a thread with 25 pages only has 7 pages listed in the sitemap. just wanted to ping you about it.

Does it happens to every thread with multiple pages ? The add-on takes the reply_count field from the thread table and divides it by the number of post per pages configured in your forum in order to calculate how many pages a thread has.

I'm going to check my own sitemap file to see if I can find a thread with missing pages.

 

[Chromaniac]

Yup. Checked around 10 or so threads with more than 3-4 entries in the sitemap file. All of them had just around 1/3rd pages.

 

[JulianD]

JulianD updated SEO Utilities with a new update entry:

1.0.1 - Minor bug fix

I overlooked the correct Post Per Page option. It should be the right one now.

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[Chromaniac]

227,853 URLs after the update. This seems more reasonable. Would dive into the sitemap file to check a few urls in a while. But seems like fixed now. Thanks!

 

[JulianD]

227,853 URLs after the update. This seems more reasonable. Would dive into the sitemap file to check a few urls in a while. But seems like fixed now. Thanks!

Thank you for helping me fix this bug!

 

[Biarritz64]

you are amazing
i waited thisr addon for long
thank you so much

for improvement, can you add page 2,3,4 etc for forum pages not only threads, it will be amazing.
the change in thread start date is brillant.

It will be nice if people who use this addon share what's happen on google console to see the difference.

thank you again @JulianD

 

[JulianD]

Thank you for your feedback!

for imptovement, can you add page 2,3,4 etc for forum not only threads, it will be amazing.

I will consider this change for the next update.

 

[Kirby]

I'd be somewhat surprised if this has a positive effect on SEO.
Google does not seem to like paginated content, they dropped support for rel prev/next years ago

 

[JulianD]

I'd be somewhat surprised if this has a positive effect on SEO.
Google does not seem to like paginated content, they dropped support for rel prev/next years ago

That's why this addon is marked as Beta and has an Experimental warning at the beginning. So far this is aimed to improve your index coverage but we still can't provide real feedback to know if this will have a positive or negative effect. I definitively will leave my feedback if I see any change.

 

[JackieChun]

Thanks for making this available! How difficult would it be to make each page of a long thread have its own auto-generated title and meta description? That would the holy grail of SEO for multi-page threads because it would make Google truly believe that it's looking at different discussions.

 

[JulianD]

Thanks for making this available! How difficult would it be to make each page of a long thread have its own auto-generated title and meta description? That would the holy grail of SEO for multi-page threads because it would make Google truly believe that it's looking at different discussions.

This is my next goal for this addon to replace the dreadful Thread Title - Page 1, Thread Title - Page 2, Thread Title - Page 3... Page 300 ... Page 15,000.....

I will keep you guys posted about it.

 

[Biarritz64]

Hi @JulianD
why don't you use the last post date of the page instead of the first post date of the page? or set the last post date of the thread and not the page on every page?

like this if a thread from 2010 have an answer today, all the page will have 2020 date?

 

[JulianD]

Hi @JulianD
why don't you use the last post date of the page instead of the first post date of the page? or set the last post date of the thread and not the page on every page?

Well , that is another option but I'm not sure if it's beneficial to change the page date every time there's a new post. I didn't want to appear that I'm trying to cheat Google but to reflect the correct date of the content of the page. If you're willing to test it in your forum, I can give you a personalized version that includes both options so you can experiment with it.