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This article helps community managers, administrators, and moderators to manage Search Engine Optimization (SEO) settings of categories in the Knowledge Base and Community platform modules.

Overview

As your community grows and starts collecting more content over time, the older content might become outdated and less relevant. Hence to maintain value, it is crucial to direct your community users to the relevant content in the community. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) settings in the Control view help you direct search engines to the relevant content in your community, bringing it to the front for your community users.

You can further hide the older content at a category level, which means that an entire category and all the topics inside the category are excluded from community search results. Additionally, it is common practice to create an Archive category to store outdated and irrelevant topics instead of deleting them.

Tip: Create an Archive category which contains outdated and irrelevant topics. Hide the Archive category from search engines and community search results.

Configure SEO Settings

To configure SEO settings for categories in Knowledge Base and Community platform modules:

  1. Log in to Control.
  2. Navigate to Platform > Knowledge Base or Community.
  3. Click the category name in which you want to configure SEO settings. Alternatively, from the three-dots horizontal icon, select Edit category. The Edit category screen appears.
  1. In the SEO Settings pane, provide the following information:
    • Title: Enter the category title that should appear in the search results.
    • Description: Enter the category details that should appear in the search results.
    • Meta Robots: Select one of the options from the dropdown list to define how the web crawlers should operate. A web crawler is a bot that browses the internet and collects information about web pages.
      • Noindex, follow: Select this option for web crawlers to crawl the category but not index and display it in search results. A web crawler is a bot that browses the internet and collects information about web pages.
      • Index, follow: Select this option for web crawlers to crawl the category and index and display it in search results.
      • Index, nofollow: Select this option for web crawlers to not crawl the category, but index and display it in search results.
      • Noindex, nofollow: Select this option for web crawlers to not crawl and not index and display the category, hiding it from search results. When this option is selected, the category is removed from the XML Sitemap.
  1. Click Save changes.

Hide Category from Community Search

To hide a category from community search results:

  1. Log in to Control.
  2. Navigate to Platform > Knowledge Base or Community.
  3. Click the category name in which you want to configure SEO settings. Alternatively, from the three-dots horizontal icon, select Edit category. The Edit category screen appears. 
  4. In the Settings pane, turn on the Hide category and topics from platform search toggle.
  1. Click Save changes.

Note: When you hide a category, the live-search dropdown does not return results inside this category.

If you have any queries or feedback, please drop an email to docs@gainsight.com or post a reply to this article.

 

Hiding content happens on a category level, which means that an entire category and all the topics inside the category can be excluded from search engines and the platform search. A common practice we often see is a so called “Archive” category in which you’ll find outdated and irrelevant topics.

 

Just to check on this @Yoeri : we have the option to do this per subforum (sub-category), with the higher level categories not having SEO settings in control. It might just be a difference in what we refer to as a category, but good to double check! 

You are correct @timcavey 

To any other clueless community professionals: the terms to use are ‘categories’, and ‘parent categories’

 

@Kenneth R has got me up to speed :wink:

Quick check on this, for anyone in the know:

 

Does ‘hide from platform search’ prevent topics in that category showing on the related topics tab? 

 

 

Hi Tim,

It does. When you hide category and topics from platform search the topics will be hidden in the “related topics” sidebar widget as well. I’ll update the documentation to make it more clear :)

Hi @Yoeri 

Two questions related to the “Hide category and topics from platform search” option. When the option is activated on a category:

  • if a topic is within this category has new activities (someone comments it), will it pop in the recently active widget on the home page when ?
  • will the category appear in the mega menu drop down?

Hope the answers to these two questions are no ;) 

 

To provide you with more contexte: we want the users to be able to find the content via mail notifications or their activity history, but not have a direct access via the platform.

 

Thanks

Hi Victor,

 

if a topic is within this category has new activities (someone comments it), will it pop in the recently active widget on the home page when ?

Yes, the recently active widget will display all topics that had recent activity. If you want to prevent older topics becoming active you can automatically close them for comments after X days of inactivity. See:

 

will the category appear in the mega menu drop down?

Yes, categories will still appear in the menu dropdown and on categories overview pages. Users can still navigate to ‘archived’ categories

Another quick question here:

 

“No index, follow”: what’s this option? What does the ‘Follow’ refer to, and can I recommend this is explained in the main content of this topic, as it’s an option in the settings that are described? 

Another quick question here:

 

“No index, follow”: what’s this option? What does the ‘Follow’ refer to, and can I recommend this is explained in the main content of this topic, as it’s an option in the settings that are described? 

 

I have answered this myself, ironically, through a Google SERP ;) 

 

We use software known as web crawlers to discover publicly available webpages. Crawlers look at webpages and follow links on those pages, much like you would if you were browsing content on the web. They go from link to link and bring data about those webpages back to Google's servers.

That’s great Tim, thanks! I would have probably redirected you to an SEO article as well ;)

Hey @Yoeri how are you ?

I cannot find “Hide category and topics from platform search*” anywhere. Can you pls enlighten me ? :P

Update: never mind, found it!!!

Hey @Gabolino 

It’s in the edit category page in Control. When you toggle the SEO settings menu you will find the toggle at the bottom (below Meta robots):

 

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