Wedge

Public area => The Pub => Topic started by: Xarcell on March 31st, 2011, 05:37 AM

Title: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Xarcell on March 31st, 2011, 05:37 AM
I was wondering if you guys have made any steps towards improving SEO?

Like the proper use of headers(in proper order, H1, H2, H3), alt attributes that aren't empty, image width & height attributes, and titles for input elements that do not have a LABEL.

Even a default Privacy Policy and Can-Spam Act of 2003(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003) Information on how to unsubscribe from the newsletter, PM's, etc(all email notifications). Both are required by law in most places. I think I read somewhere that 80% of sites don't have them :P

Also, proper "Contact Us".
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 09:49 AM
Firstly, please read http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=427913.0

Secondly:
* proper use of headers is not that significant, especially in an environment where the bulk of the actual content is user generated and that trying to optimise it is more like picking the exact shade of a colour rather than picking the colour as a whole
* there are no alt attributes in the code for the majority of images seeing that HTML 5 does not require them (and we use an HTML 5 doctype)
* image width and height - funny how even the W3C has been pushing for years to deprecate those
* most of the input elements have labels anyway
* default privacy policy is a bit difficult seeing how while it's a legal requirement in most places, that puts the onus on us to figure out a default policy that meets the legal requirements of all the different countries - which we're not responsible for in the slightest
* Can-Spam Act... do the notifications not include a link to unsubscribe from them?
* Proper Contact-Us, we can probably do

I should note that other than the first item, none of the above are actually useful in SEO terms.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on March 31st, 2011, 10:28 AM
Re: images. Dimensions are generally not useful. The only time they'll be useful, is when there are lots of icons and you need to get a proper layout as soon as the page shows up.
When it comes to icons, Wedge manages them differently (spriting or base64 encoding), so there's no point in discussing SEO for them anyway. As for big images, they'll all be managed by Aeva Media, and obviously it stores image dimensions so it's not a problem.

Re: markup, we're not using h1/h2/etc more than SMF for now. However, since I converted the templates to HTML5, the category and title headers were turned into <header> tags. I'm planning to implement <article> and <section> tags as well, but I have yet to decide whether blog comments should be in their own <article> tags or not.

Re: labels, I didn't change much here, but I did ensure that labels that have a nested input, do not specify a 'for' parameter. It's a waste of space, and nested tags are supported by all browsers except for IE6. I don't see the point in wasting bandwidth over this wicked little outdated browser.

Re: privacy, the source code will be available for everyone to see that we're not using anyone's data... As for how admins may use the data: it's not up to us to determine a privacy policy, is it...?

Re: contact us, I don't really see the point personally. When it comes to a blog, you can easily PM/e-mail the author by visiting their profile area. For an entire forum... Check out the memberlist and click the admin's name.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Artur on March 31st, 2011, 01:37 PM
Quote from Xarcell on March 31st, 2011, 05:37 AM
I was wondering if you guys have made any steps towards improving SEO?
You don't really need seo to get your forum indexed right. If your forum is popular, google and other search engines will update things fast. And making all things to seo links, doesn't change your popularity.
Quote from Xarcell on March 31st, 2011, 05:37 AM
Like the proper use of headers(in proper order, H1, H2, H3), alt attributes that aren't empty, image width & height attributes, and titles for input elements that do not have a LABEL.
Alt attributes for images should be used, but I never heard that image hight and width is a must.
Quote from Xarcell on March 31st, 2011, 05:37 AM
Even a default Privacy Policy and Can-Spam Act of 2003(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003) Information on how to unsubscribe from the newsletter, PM's, etc(all email notifications). Both are required by law in most places. I think I read somewhere that 80% of sites don't have them :P
How to unsubscribe from newsletters and pm's? Almost everyone knows that you have forum settings for this - at least the ones who use forums often. Implementing a privacy policy would be really hard. Countries have different ways how a privacy policy can affect. You would need to ship many policies with the forum software.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: CJ Jackson on March 31st, 2011, 02:06 PM
Yawn SEO, I always told myself to forget SEO and focus more on productivity.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 02:08 PM
Quote from Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 09:49 AM
Firstly, please read http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=427913.0
;)
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: DoctorMalboro on March 31st, 2011, 02:50 PM
I want useful functions, not stupid and useless stuff like pretty urls... now get back to work :P

/mewhips Arantor
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Artur on March 31st, 2011, 02:57 PM
Well I use "pretty urls" on my site because i think index.php?seite=news is harder to remember than news.html.

But what I often see, are sites which use things like:
http://examplesite.org/index.php/really-long-topic-name-which-no-one-remb-f18-t346.html

Honestly, who can remember all that stuff at all :lol:. I can't :unsure:.

If they would look like "http://examplesite.org/f1134.html" or "http://examplesite.org/t334.html" they look memorable to me.

I saw some topics on phpbb.com too about that seo stuff and like a team member there mentioned: Even without using seo at that site, the topic already got indexed in google, if you do a search with some words of that topic.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 03:09 PM
Pretty URLs != SEO. Pretty URLs is what's in use here for example, and that's reasonably nice looking, and not hideous to remember.

I'm not even going to turn it on for my own stuff.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: MultiformeIngegno on March 31st, 2011, 05:48 PM
Quote from Nao/Gilles on March 31st, 2011, 10:28 AM
I'm planning to implement <article> and <section> tags as well, but I have yet to decide whether blog comments should be in their own <article> tags or not.
That would be great! ;)
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: TE on March 31st, 2011, 05:54 PM
Quote from Nao/Gilles on March 31st, 2011, 10:28 AM
I'm planning to implement <article> and <section> tags as well, but I have yet to decide whether blog comments should be in their own <article> tags or not.
Would be great in general, but IIRC you'll break IE6 compability..
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: MultiformeIngegno on March 31st, 2011, 06:02 PM
Who cares...? :whistle:
No seriously, maybe a check before echoing those parameters? :unsure:
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 06:04 PM
We're not overly interested in IE6 compatibility, and given suitable CSS declarations it should work tolerably well anyway...
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: MultiformeIngegno on March 31st, 2011, 06:17 PM
Quote from Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 06:04 PM
We're not overly interested in IE6 compatibility, and given suitable CSS declarations it should work tolerably well anyway...
Yes, I think there won't be any problem!
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Xarcell on March 31st, 2011, 07:00 PM
Mobile phones with full browsing support and Touch Screens change things really.

H1, H2, H3 isn't really needed if your doing HTML 5 <header>/<section>. That's even better.

I'll argue the image height & width though. Without it, too much page jumping going on. Especially at slower speeds, or those with latency/server issues. Every little bit helps...

Alt attributes are still needed, even though they are not a requirement for HTML 5 Doctype. Again, mobile phones, ipads, some netbooks, will not cache or even load most images over 25K. So from there, you see the problem. Same goes for height/width.
Quote from Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 02:08 PM
Quote from Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 09:49 AM
Firstly, please read http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=427913.0
;)
I completely disagree with about 80% of what was said there. But hey, it seems your mind is set, so there's no since in arguing about it.

Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 07:21 PM
Quote
Mobile phones with full browsing support and Touch Screens change things really.
Yes, I agree. I use a touch screen device daily for this reason.
Quote
H1, H2, H3 isn't really needed if your doing HTML 5 <header>/<section>. That's even better.
If you're really serious about it, why aren't you asking us about things like microdata?
Quote
I'll argue the image height & width though. Without it, too much page jumping going on. Especially at slower speeds, or those with latency/server issues. Every little bit helps...
Except that search engines do not hit the images as much, and since speed is one factor in Google's ranking, and having a higher content:markup ratio has to help in that too...
Quote
Alt attributes are still needed, even though they are not a requirement for HTML 5 Doctype.
Even when the specification explicitly says they should be empty for when they are used in non informational contexts, e.g. bullet point images?
Quote
Again, mobile phones, ipads, some netbooks, will not cache or even load most images over 25K.
And? That's relevant how to this part of the discussion? I'm aware of that limitation, but from a purely 'search engine optimisation' point of view it doesn't make so much difference. SEO by definition is making the content more accessible to machine readers, often at the expense of real users.
Quote
I completely disagree with about 80% of what was said there.
So you're telling me that you can magically make a forum *measurably* better in search engine rankings without dictating the content to users?

See, to be honest, that's just "I disagree but don't have anything to back up arguing why I disagree"...
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: and on March 31st, 2011, 09:47 PM
and seo URL will be supported?

ets
for example
http://wedge.org/public-area/the-pub/wedge-seo.html 


or similar
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 10:02 PM
-sigh- Pretty URLs IS supported but NOT for SEO purposes. It does not add significant ranking benefit. It is supported solely because it is nice.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: and on March 31st, 2011, 10:09 PM
I called the CEO because it is customary
my users too lazy to write a URL with anchor
well at least see where the transitions within a forum

such a reference to nobody about nothing says http://wedge.org/index.php?topic=6551.msg257181; topicseen
unlike http://wedge.org/pub/6551/wedge-seo/
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 10:21 PM
So, you can see it's added here, and similar implemented in Wedge. It's a core feature, not enabled by default. And it was done to make the URLs nice, just that I won't use it myself.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: and on March 31st, 2011, 10:30 PM
I like
(if only numbers are not indicated to topics)
http:// wedge. org/pub/6551/wedge-seo/
yes with cyrillic normally that would work

sample - question on the forum and Administration
of Russian - Вопросы по работе форума и администрации
translit - ........./voprosy-po-rabote-foruma-i-administracii/
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 10:33 PM
No, we will NOT do that. I am not adding possibly multiple database queries just to load the page.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: and on March 31st, 2011, 10:44 PM
but I can get instructions on how to do it myself? (if I need it actually)
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 10:49 PM
Not from us, to be honest. We're not going to spend too much time rewriting it when we're not planning on using it like that. It does not bring anything useful other than serious extra load, and shorter looking URLs.

Consider: YouTube doesn't have SEO URLs and it hasn't lost out in traffic or hits ;)
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: and on March 31st, 2011, 10:54 PM
Arantor I do not consider seo url as an assistant

not for greed
for convenience
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: DoctorMalboro on March 31st, 2011, 11:01 PM
If you want to keep everyone happy, do as Wordpress and let everyone choose which kind of URLs use. Simple or "Pretty" URLs.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 11:27 PM
That's the thing, people don't type URLs, they copy paste them. That means they can still see the name in it just fine, so it is not any more or less convenient, it is one of aesthetics.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Xarcell on April 1st, 2011, 12:47 AM
We obviously have to different opinions. No point in arguing over it.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on April 1st, 2011, 01:05 AM
My opinion is based on experience and corroborated by plenty of others in the industry, but show me something that disagrees that's based on something other than speculation and I'll listen.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: DoctorMalboro on April 1st, 2011, 01:09 AM
Use goo.gl or bit.ly, that's the easiest way and the one that means I don't have to bare the fact of "herp derp i has pretty urlz, can i has indexation pl0x?" of people...
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on April 1st, 2011, 01:19 AM
I bet the search engines have been very careful with such links because of the link juice that must flow in and out of those services.

I don't really like having a core feature reliant on an external service - but if anything URL shorteners just back up my argument that 'friendly URLs' are not that relevant.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on April 1st, 2011, 08:58 PM
Going through a backlog of 27 unread posts here...
Quote from TE on March 31st, 2011, 05:54 PM
Quote from Nao/Gilles on March 31st, 2011, 10:28 AM
I'm planning to implement <article> and <section> tags as well, but I have yet to decide whether blog comments should be in their own <article> tags or not.
Would be great in general, but IIRC you'll break IE6 compability..
Technically, it breaks in IE6/7/8.
And no, it doesn't break in Wedge, because we're using the html5shiv. Google it :) It's a very small script that makes sure the tags are stylable. (You still have to declare them in the css, but then again it's also the same for most other browsers.)
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: DoctorMalboro on April 1st, 2011, 09:04 PM
True, i use it once.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Xarcell on April 1st, 2011, 09:07 PM
Try http://try.powermapper.com/demo/sortsite.aspx

It's just a free tool I use. It shows all pages with SEO issues and the link to the standards as such. Like I said, just a tool. I learned alot from it, and changed some of my HTML/CSS coding ways...
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on April 1st, 2011, 09:12 PM
Quote from Makar on March 31st, 2011, 10:30 PM
I like
(if only numbers are not indicated to topics)
http:// wedge. org/pub/6551/wedge-seo/
A big no. I'm strongly against URLs with no visible ID.
- The extra query mentioned by Pete... And it's not exactly like it's not an expensive one.
- What if you rename the topic later? Do you keep the old title in the URL (bad) or generate 404s for existing links? (very bad.)
- What if you move the topic to another board? The top-level URL will change, but what about the low-level one? The topic title? It can only be done if all topic titles are stored in a single pool for the entire forum. Which means if you have 5000 blogs and someone types "Hello" as their first post, they'll get a URL like "hello1234" instead. For no reason.

Really... It's way better to always have the topic ID. Plus, you can shorten the URL by just specifying the topic ID without anything to its right.
Quote
yes with cyrillic normally that would work
UTF8 languages are supported in my pretty URLs implementation. At least it works for Japanese.
Posted: April 1st, 2011, 09:11 PM
Quote from Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 10:49 PM
Consider: YouTube doesn't have SEO URLs and it hasn't lost out in traffic or hits ;)
And, err... This little website called Facebook or something........ :whistle:
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on April 1st, 2011, 09:13 PM
Quote
And, err... This little website called Facebook or something
Psst... yes it does. e.g. www.facebook.com/arantor(http://www.facebook.com/arantor)
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on April 1st, 2011, 09:21 PM
Quote from Xarcell on April 1st, 2011, 09:07 PM
Try http://try.powermapper.com/demo/sortsite.aspx
On wedge.org...

if (typeof side == "undefined") side = 0;
 
"This page contains placeholder text such as Lorem Ipsum, CHANGEME, FIXME or TODO."

Smart. Is it complaining about "undefined"? Uh...

"The SCRIPT LANGUAGE attribute is deprecated in HTML 4.01."

Too bad it's a XHTML page...

Also seems to complain that SMF is using some h2 tags without being preceeded by h1 tags...
From the little I know, Google actually likes h1 tags to be used once (most important data on the page), and so on. That doesn't add up...
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on April 1st, 2011, 09:22 PM
Quote from Arantor on April 1st, 2011, 09:13 PM
Quote
And, err... This little website called Facebook or something
I know (try with "noisen"), but it still uses non-pretty URLs by default...
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on April 1st, 2011, 09:24 PM
Technically it has a habit of using the bastardised #! format to indicate to search engines that it's AJAX-loaded content too...
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on April 1st, 2011, 10:42 PM
Err... Isn't it Twitter that does that?

And is it actually a 'format'? I thought it was just Twitter's way of handling the thing, maybe they just didn't like having just /#/ in the URL (which would work fine AFAIK)...
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on April 1st, 2011, 10:50 PM
No, it's not just Twitter.

Google suggested it - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html
Examples of it in live use - http://www.yourseoplan.com/examples-of-sites-using-googles-ajax-indexing-specification/

But it's not really *that* well adopted other than places like Twitter and FB from what I've seen - and Yahoo/Bing don't handle it yet AFAIK.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Aaron on April 1st, 2011, 11:48 PM
Quote from Nao/Gilles on April 1st, 2011, 09:12 PM
UTF8 languages are supported in my pretty URLs implementation. At least it works for Japanese.
I have to ask... to what extend? I mean, hiragana and katakana are relatively trivial (the same goes for hangul in Korean, by the way), but what about kanji? Not only are their readings different depending on context, but also on language (different in Chinese and Korean, for instance -- I figure you already know this, but there's more people reading).

Genuinely interested, really. :)
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on April 9th, 2011, 01:12 PM
@Pete> Is it just me, or did Twitter actually revert back to its old website...? I don't see #! in the URL anymore, and the huge sidebar is gone...

@Aaron> You know, it's just a matter of stripping out the unsafe characters from URLs (#, /, things like that) and leaving out the rest... Since the matching is done in UTF mode, it does leave complex characters in the URL as expected. ;)

(Sorry for the delay in answering. That's me -- sometimes I'll take even months to answer an old opened tab.)
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Arantor on April 9th, 2011, 04:04 PM
I haven't been on Twitter in forever, I get all the updates I want via RSS ;)

Certainly, mobile.twitter.com doesn't but the again it doesn't have much need to.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: borg1985 on April 9th, 2011, 10:14 PM
Quote from Nao/Gilles on April 9th, 2011, 01:12 PM
@Pete> Is it just me, or did Twitter actually revert back to its old website...? I don't see #! in the URL anymore, and the huge sidebar is gone...
I just looked and I see the new site and the #! in the URL.  There is still the option to view the old version though.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on April 9th, 2011, 10:41 PM
Oh. So it's settable!
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: borg1985 on April 9th, 2011, 11:05 PM
Quote
Welcome to #NewTwitter! Read up on what’s new. You can still access old Twitter for a limited time.
For the moment yes, but not sure for how long.
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Aaron on April 9th, 2011, 11:56 PM
Quote from Nao/Gilles on April 9th, 2011, 01:12 PM
@Aaron> You know, it's just a matter of stripping out the unsafe characters from URLs (#, /, things like that) and leaving out the rest... Since the matching is done in UTF mode, it does leave complex characters in the URL as expected. ;)
Ah, you're keeping the URLs in unicode, then? The most semantically correct option, I guess. :)
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on April 10th, 2011, 12:28 AM
Yup!
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on April 10th, 2011, 12:14 PM
Also, with URLs always containing the topic ID, getting a wrong topic title (through incompatible charsets or things like that) is still okay, you don't "lose" it. You may end up with a 404 error if trying to visit a board with complex chars, though. Haven't looked into that (much).
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Aaron on April 10th, 2011, 12:18 PM
Indeed. Would be nice if you'd do a 301 redirect to the proper URL in such cases, btw. :)
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Nao on April 10th, 2011, 12:24 PM
When the topic title is different from the actual current one...?
I don't know, hmm how do I make sure a string is equivalent to another, whatever the format they're in...? urldecode() first I suppose, then...
Title: Re: Wedge & SEO
Post by: Aaron on April 10th, 2011, 02:21 PM
Well, if you're already generating a canonical url for each page, you could compare against that, I suppose... SMF has loads of duplicate urls though -- not sure how much of them you lot have tackled already, but they might result in a few extra (unwanted?) redirects...