SEO (Search Engine Optimization) improvements

That’s a really nice and big package of updates! Thank you! We will check everything asap and set them up.

Some really nice updates here!

We’ll reuse the logo that you provided in Control → Customization → Header → Logo for this.

Our community has a Server Side Include (SSI) configuration instead of the default one. Where does the logo come from in this case?

It still comes from there 🙂 We’ll move the logo upload to another place. Meanwhile, you can activate default header, upload logo, switch back to SSI and then save changes - bit of a workaround but this should work

Thank you! This workaround is no problem.

Another question regarding the logo:
If I understand correctly, this logo is used for different purposes, including social sharing to Facebook and now Google Structured Data. Facebook recommends you use images that are at least 1200 x 630 pixels for the best display on high resolution devices. For Google Structured Data (Articles) the logo has to fit into a 600 x 60 box. I haven’t found a solution yet how to adhere to both. What is your recommendation? How does inSided do it themselves?

I also used the testing tool for Structured Data in order to get a preview on how articles would look like on Google, but the tool doesn't seem to recognize any elements. It looks like as if the structured data isn’t live yet.

edit: When I check an inSpired article, it seems to work.

We used the guidelines from Google Structured Data (Articles) that says 600x60 (we scale logo’s to 60 height so the comply with the guidelines). We’ve also validated articles with the testing tool you linked to. It might take some time to index. Unfortunately it doesn’t support a rich/visual preview, which is possible with this test tool

Thank you!

Regarding test tool: The one you linked doesn’t work for me either, neither with our community articles nor inSpired articles (but it shows different error messages in both cases).

@all: Is anyone able to get previews that work? 

The one I linked to (https://search.google.com/test/rich-results) is a beta test tool that supports some rich previews. e.g. when I insert a link to a QA topic it will show me a rich preview of a QA topic like this: 

Hide contentShow content

 

We did validate our aticles with this testing tool that you linked to (testing tool for Structured Data). But unfortunately this testing tool does not support rich previews (like above) for articles. Hope this clarifies some things :)

Thanks for sharing, did not know this is possible… super handy!

We are planning to upload PDF files and will be linking from our posts to the PDF files. We don't want Google to index the PDF files and want to use x-robot-tag to noindex the PDF files. How can we block PDFs on our own using x-robot-tag?

Thanks!

I’m not sure how this would work, not familiar with this to be honest. Are you planning to host the PDF files on your own server and add URLs to these files in the topics or do you want to upload/attach these PDF files directly to a topic?

We’d probably be attaching them to topics. Our SEO lead sent me this article with instructions: https://geoffkenyon.com/how-to-remove-pdf-files-google/

Thanks for sharing. The documentation mentions the following; 

In order to apply the x-robots noindex tag to you will need to be able to edit your .htaccess file.

It’s not possible to edit the .htaccess file on our platform so I’m afraid this won’t be possible

Thanks for looking into this @Yoeri