Seo

[StuartH]

How do we implement any SEO for our nodebb's on my other sites I have Analitics installed to keep track of traffic, do you guys have any advice on the best ways of driving traffic to the sites using Nodebb?

[julian]

NodeBB automatically makes itself crawlable by robots, so there's nothing you need to do on that front

How's that for a change? No SEO plugin required.

[StuartH]

That is so cool, so no need to do back links or anything else?

[nevinx]

@StuartH That's not quite right, if you want to increase your forum's visibility in search engines it does not matter how much internal search optimization you did for your site/forum you still need backlinks from other websites.

[StuartH]

@nevinx thanks I was and have started to do some backlinks anyway not going hurt and like you it will still need to be done.

[julian]

@nevinx @StuartH - That's right, we don't handle backlinking, nor do we support pingbacks at the moment, although that sounds like something that can easily be added.

Pingbacks, that is... backlinking, I can't control

[Steve]

I hate SEO. Glad google is valuing CONTENT more than garbage links and bs more and more every update.

[jonathanmh]

I agree on the pingback feature, that would actually be nice. I run some blogs and I'm always happy to know when somebody mentions me

[bentael]

@julian how does the Single Page App (SPA) content get crawled?
I am way out of date when to comes to SEO now, but as far as i know, most of them will not execute heavy javascript, is NodeBB "rendering-and-writing" the "ajaxified" pages for the crawlers to read?

[julian]

is NodeBB "rendering-and-writing" the "ajaxified" pages for the crawlers to read?

@bentael -- no way, I made the decision early on not to do this because it is a drain on resources (how much, I did not test, as the alternatives were enticing enough)

Every link on NodeBB is accessible by direct link, and if you try viewing the source, you'll see the page content in <noscript> tags. I have heard arguments for and against this approach, but as we are being crawled properly by Google, it seems to be working just fine

Always open to suggestions for improvements, of course!

This is also the approach that Discourse has taken, btw.