Suggestions to boost Node BB SEO traffic Growth
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This topic gave me idea to post this.
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/14052/thoughts-on-content-ownership-and-long-meaningful-discussions/6I believe node bb is a powerful forum software and I only feel what is missing are those features which can be found in top forum sites like Stackoverflow, Quora, and reddit. All these sites have below features which node bb is missing and it would be great to see these in node bb too.
Unable to make numeric list while answering a topic. I had to manually write 1. to start my points. This can be added to node bb composer by default. Users love creating content while giving points.
SEO is crucial to success of the top 3 sites, node bb is lacking in following:
a. No support for Google AMP for topic pages, this is very simple to implement but once dont, you guys will see 90 times SEO traffic improvement from Google. We have tried and tested this ourselves and it works. Implementation guide https://developers.google.com/amp/
any ideas when r u guys releasing this?b. missing schema.org Google Structure data , this is behind the Google search snippet that we usually see from wikipedia and top sites like dictionaries etc. More info here https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/structured-data/#0
c. Ability for users to create their own blogs or spaces (like in quora) , or subreddits in (reddit). Currently users have no way of creating their own discussion categories.
d. In Ability to follow tags , like if we follow a topic on quora, we see all posts tagged with that topic in our news feed. Would love to have this.
e. missing the personalized newsfeed, fb, quora and reddit front page, all have personalized newsfeeds.
f. User profile pages seems empty, ability for users to create their blogs, diaries , photo gallery, show their most viewed topics, most voted topics, topics with most posts, etc etc, have a look at quora profile pages https://www.quora.com/profile/Jimmy-Wales
g. Ability to create monetizable ad widgets by default to monetize with ads that look like content , look at quora in article ads , they are so clean they dont even look like ads.
h. ability to have fixed side bar widgets, so that they stay on top even if page posts r being scrolled. so that some content remains above the fold, like quora does it.
I. encouragement for users to create quality content and do meaningful discussions, we can do this by introducing(nested) comments on each question and on each post like all 3 big sites above do it. This will hugely increase topics retention rate, look at YouTube comments section , it is itself a full social forum on videos. Ability to upvote comments would also be bonus.
j. Turning node bb into a question answer site like SO , quora or ask reddit, introducing things like best reply, best answer, etc etc
k. A way for users to create links to their posted content. Backlinks are hugely imp for long term organic growth for any SEO forum. How can we do this in node bb?
l. inability for users to mention or share another topic link directly from composer when replying or posting a topic . We should have a way to mention other topics while replying in other topics, this will create internal linking, again crucial for SEO success. Need this for both mobile and desktop.
m. Missing auto suggest while searching for topics from mobile, please enable this. it only works on desktop.
n. ability to copy a link to clipboard for each post on topic page, this is to share a specific reply for any. and paste it anywhere else. users should be able to share links to specific sections of a single topic directly, with no scrolling needed.
I have a strong belief that if you guys implement these features it will be a sky rocket node bb growth. Otherwise users will still choose other robust forums like discourse who might have these already. we can learn and clone their features too.
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F6 out of 6
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Some of these points are basically "make NodeBB into something else than a forum software". More specifically, I'm talking about c, d, e, i and j.
And I would say a lot of them aren't really fit for core NodeBB, but rather for plugins:
f. Are they really empty? The only thing Quora has that NodeBB doesn't is this right bar with credentials and "knows about". And I wouldn't say adding this to the profile is best for core NodeBB - it seems more like a plugin material. Oh and look, there is at least one plugin for this: https://github.com/NicolasSiver/nodebb-plugin-ns-custom-fields
And there are a few fields that NodeBB does have and Quora doesn't: reputation, website, when user joined the site and when he was last online.
So I wouldn't say they are empty, and you can always use plugins to populate them morec. There is this plugin https://github.com/yariplus/nodebb-plugin-modmin (you can let everyone create their own category and manage it), but I think it would need a little more work to be really good at what you want
e. I would also say that this isn't really core NodeBB material as newsfeeds aren't really a forum thing, but still - a plugin adding them would be great. And I'm just an user not a maintainer, so maybe someone from NodeBB disagrees and it will make it way there some day
g. I think all monetization is left to plugins. Even your standard adsense is only a plugin.
i and j - as I said, they are basically "make NodeBB less like forum and more like some other website type", but I think plugins and themes that allow you to do this would be nice. There are some plugins for question and answer type of topics, but nested replies might be nice
Not sure if that is currently possible to do though, so maybe allowing that kind of customization might be a good change.k. Not sure what do you mean here - you can get a link to any post from its timestamp (just right click it and select copy link location, or whatever your browser calls this option). For example, the link to your post here is https://community.nodebb.org/post/75846
If you mean linking to topics/posts by specific users, take a look at user profiles In the hamburger menu you will find your topics, posts, and best posts (by reputation they got)I don't have anything against a, b, d, h, l, m and n, as they are mostly just improvements.
AMP topics would be great, but I'm not sure if it's as simple to implement as you're saying here. NodeBB has a lot of js everywhere and I'm not sure if amp elements could replace it all. So it would probably not just be "turn custom js to AMP elements", but rather "rewrite topic pages entirely for AMP". But I never did anything with AMP, so I might be wrongI'm also hoping for official PWA support, as right now you can only get a basic one (no notifications) by modifying a core NodeBB file (
src/controllers/index.js) and your nginx config (explained here: https://community.nodebb.org/post/59669). In the next NodeBB version I think this will be possible with a plugin (I added a filter:manifest.build as was suggested in the next post in that topic), but still - as NodeBB is striving to be most progressive a better manifest and some default service worker (with correct front end js in place) in core would be nice. -
@yariplus Already done that and even added one of these features myself
After I finish with some more important plugins for my use case I will probably try to add the second thing I wrote about in my issue there - that is deleting categories (although now I think a better option is only letting users disable them, so they can be restored by an administrator). -
@faizanzahid said in Suggestions to boost Node BB SEO traffic Growth:
n. ability to copy a link to clipboard for each post on topic page, this is to share a specific reply for any. and paste it anywhere else. users should be able to share links to specific sections of a single topic directly, with no scrolling needed.
Like most social media networks, the timestamp is the link to the actual post. Also the address bar changes as you scroll.
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Thank you for the idea of SEO.
a. I agree with @julian there are philosophical disagreement
b. agree, adding Google schema support could be built-in like we have seen FB open graph is built-in
c. not a forum, try other software
d. would be helpful, could be done by a plugin. Argueable could be built-in too, IMHO
e. I have nothing against but I think it would be a large project because I could picture some addition live ML and log mining needs to be developed for this to be generalized, and could complicate the core NodeBB a lot.
f. not a forum, sounds to me a social network
g. has been done by plugin and you could pretty much develop it yourself.
h. not thing against it, I think it currently works.
i. it's more of a site operating and community engagement strategy
j. not a forum
k. Good idea, could be done by plugin
l. This is already in place, right
m. good idea. I don't see why not but I assume it already works
n. same as k
