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Guide

5 steps to prepare your community settings for SEO


Julian
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  • Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • 907 replies

For (almost) all communities, organic traffic coming in via search engines is the biggest driver for new visitors. Search engines like Google love community content, it naturally ranks high in search result pages as the content is generated from real users speaking to each other and content usually has more relevance than, say, a marketing website.

 

This does not mean you should sit back and relax—it is highly recommended to optimize your community to make sure you get as many visitors possible. This 5 step guide will help you to understand why, and how, certain changes will benefit your organic traffic performance.

 

Step 1: Set your Meta tags right

 

Meta tags define how your community will be displayed in search result pages, e.g. the title of your community as well as a short intro-text:

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Your community has default content for the title of your community, a description text as well as further information on category level, however it is quite generic and might not be matching what your community is about:

 

hn81AtTkK8hJti4AJo3v6o3mBmBWHCqKoyeYsLywPqJM7D0s-TJDvV05YSPHX3tzf1A-PMaSaqaCKJk1QTyyS8WVXlBubGW5ITaLEm-IWz7OHkE5x4LevcrGNS9c9DNZz9ejJmYA

 

You can optimize the title and description of your community in Control → Customization → Site identity. If you also want to customize the meta description of your categories, then you can do this within the category settings page itself. (Control → Platform → Community → Pick a category).

 

Best practice here is to present the main goal / focus of your community. What can users do or expect after clicking on the link?

 

Step 2: Check the robots.txt file

 

By default, search engines will “crawl” and index every (publicly visible) page on your community. But sometimes this is unnecessary (e.g. a search results page) or even unwanted (e.g. user profiles, old content). Search engines usually have a “crawl budget” per domain and you don’t want to waste this on pages that aren’t relevant for users searching for information. 

 

The inSided platform already comes with a standard robots.txt file, which will guide search engines and leave out most of the pages that are not relevant - so you should find that your robots.txt file is already filled by us. You can find this under Control → Settings → Robots.txt.

 

Is your robots.txt file empty? You can find an example attached to this guide!

 

But maybe you want to customize it even further, by adding some commands to further steer the behaviour of search engines. If you want to learn more about the possibilities, check out this guide from Google.

 

Step 3: Add a link to your sitemap

 

A sitemap is basically a map of all pages on your community. It helps search engines to navigate your community quicker—new content is indexed faster. Your robots.txt should already include the sitemap location, it looks like this:

 

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

 

We recommend checking this yourself to make sure you are not missing out on this. You can find more information on how to add a sitemap to your robots.txt here.

 

Step 4: Q&A cards / Google rich results

 

Did you know that Google uses your community content to highlight answered questions on a search results page? Frequently asked questions will be highlighted with the answer right underneath:

 

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However, Google only can make use of this when it is clear what the answer to the question is. Hence, marking questions as solved will help you to increase the number of these rich results to be displayed. Our guide about marking solutions can help you to learn when something should be marked as answered.

 

Curious to learn how many rich results are currently loaded and displayed on search results pages? Within Google Search Console, navigate to [Q&A]. Then click on “valid” and “Impressions” to see the amounts:

 

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Step 5: Archive old content with “No-index” & “nofollow” 

 

Does your community have a lot of old, outdated content? This will damage your SEO and your activation, as customers will see it and click on it, but just as quickly leave the community again as they find the information is not applicable. Google will notice this and as a result your community content will rank lower overall. Therefore it makes much sense to archive certain pieces of content, in order to help more up-to-date content rank higher. 

 

Nofollow vs. follow attributes

 

Old content usually has a lot of pages that link to it—think of a new user asking a question, and a super user pointing her/him to a topic where the information can be found. Search engines look at how many links are pointing to a page in order to find relevant and popular content. The downside is that this can give a boost to that outdated content which you don’t want to see ranking high in search result pages. Hence, a “nofollow” attribute can help to force search engines not to count this.

 

No-index attribute

 

Some content should not appear on search result pages at all, however you do not want to fully delete it from your community. Google recently stopped using commands to de-index content based on the robots.txt file, so we have added the option to control indexing and following directly via the category settings page (found under Control → Platform → Community → Pick a category). Now you can set up rules very easily via the “SEO settings” drop-down menu:

 

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We recommend creating one or multiple archive categories where you move content to, should you have a feeling that it is so outdated that it will not really help any visitor. Activate the “noindex, nofollow” meta robot for this category, and it will not be listed in search result pages any more.

 

Be careful moving popular topics to an archive category. Sometimes it is better to update very popular topics instead of hiding them, as this could damage your overall traffic. Google Search Console can help you to identify high-performing content.

 

There you have it, 5 steps to making sure you’re on top of SEO for your community. We hope you found this guide useful, as always if you have any questions please reach out to us. We are constantly updating our SEO features to make sure your community adapts to the ever-changing world of SEO, if you have any suggestions for us, let us know on our community!

 

Did you find this topic helpful?

11 replies

victorlacombe
  • Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • 35 replies
  • June 21, 2021

Hi @Julian thanks for the article. I’m wondering, how can we change the text that appears when you share the link of your community?

 

I can see that the preview of the link (title + image + description) is different from the Site Identity meta data. “Participez à la conversation | matera-en” is not what I added to the meta data in the control (cf. below)

 

Thanks for your help

 

View of the control


 

View of the website preview 

 


Julian
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  • Author
  • Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • 907 replies
  • June 21, 2021

Good question, thanks for sharing this here. I’ve discussed this with colleagues recently, there is a “phrase” used in the meta information which is not visible on this page. In order to change the “matera-en”, you will need to add a new phrase. You can find this under [Customization] - [Phrases], simply click on “Add phrase”, or use this uril:

https://DOMAIN.insided.com/settings/translation/add

You will have to add a Module and a Key, so that the platform knows which phrase to change. The modules and the key are:

Module:

Forum Metatags

Key:

community.name

As a last step, add what you would like it replaced with in the “Singular” field. As there is no plural version necessary, leave that field empty.

After saving the phrase, this will be adjusted in the platform.


victorlacombe
  • Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • 35 replies
  • June 21, 2021

Thanks @Julian , great to know we can modify this!
Is there a way to modify the description too? What key should I use to do so?

 


Julian
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  • Author
  • Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • 907 replies
  • June 22, 2021

I have checked with the team, as this description should be taken from your settings in the site identity page.

From their perspective, it probably is caused by the community being only accessible after login. It most likely is taking the setting that was chosen before the community has been set to “private”.


alison.mancinelli

@Julian I am curious if after we take our site public the meta data description will update? Similar to Victor, I updated my data and I am still getting the incorrect data. 


Julian
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  • Author
  • Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • 907 replies
  • April 22, 2022

sorry for the delay in response. I am not 100% sure, but to my knowledge that information should be updated soon after the change, once Google has crawled all pages and received the updated meta information.


andy.hawkins
  • Contributor ⭐️
  • 1 reply
  • May 31, 2023

Howdy, I realize this is a pretty old thread, but I found it via Google (ha!). @Julian or anyone - is there a way to noindex members in a public-facing instance? I am using robots.txt to do this and Google doesn’t like it. Thanks for the help!


KellyBebenek
  • Helper ⭐️
  • 42 replies
  • January 8, 2025

Hi, I don’t see Site Identify under Customization, has it moved? We’ve recently rebranded our community and I need to update our preview meta image.


Kenneth R
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  • Gainsight Community Manager
  • 424 replies
  • January 9, 2025

Hi ​@KellyBebenek - yes indeed, things have changed (we’ll update this article).  If you go into Customization mode in the front-end, you’ll find the SEO stuff under Theme > Branding.


Sam77
  • Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • 15 replies
  • January 9, 2025

How do we control what is displayed after the main title/description? Google is picking up what we have in Theme > Branding just fine for the main title/description - but the rest seems to be all over.

I’m not sure where it’s picking up the descriptive text for the sub headings it is showing. The first two are forum posts, and the next three are product forums sections. -with random descriptions that do not align with the SEO Description in place for each forum section.


Kenneth R
Forum|alt.badge.img+5
  • Gainsight Community Manager
  • 424 replies
  • January 14, 2025

Hi ​@Sam77 - these are areas where Google will take creative liberties.  Google will sometimes use the descriptions we give to the categories, but may also choose to create its own if it decides that the description is too long or doesn’t match the content closely enough.  These are things we can influence but ultimately can’t control.


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