Pushing forums in the AI SEO domination era
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It seems that Google is pushing for more structured data, with focus on content actually made by humans. They just announced support for
DiscussionForumPostingstructured data, and along with a "perspectives" filter and Discussions and Forums "category" in results that are trying to highlight social media/forum discussions, it seems their response to AI generated content breaking SEO (see this viral thread from founder of a company actively making the web worse) is promoting user-generated content and push the problem back to social media and forum moderation (see also their updates to quality rater guidelines adding an "experience" metric).But why does structured data help here? Why only now? Well, I imagine it's also their response to LLMs. They didn't need that much structured data when one could be reasonably sure the free-flowing text was done by humans. So Google focused on analyzing the text themselves and didn't really need the websites to tell them what that is, since what mattered was the content more than who made the content. Now creating new text that looks human to their algorithms is becoming cheap, and trying to automatically moderate the entire internet isn't feasible. So it seems Google realized that they can't trust content providers to provide decent content, and while obviously bots are rampant in user-generated content too, it's not them who have to deal with moderation. Wikipedia and even Reddit seem to be more trustworthy than news articles or blogs for many issues (e.g. product reviews), so they need to adjust to not lose users (even if they are very much part of the issue themselves).
Anyway, NodeBB already implements this - so what's changing is that Google should now be able to pick up this metadata.
I'm saying should becauseit seems to be slightly broken currently - it's throwing errors because of invalid name data type for NodeBB (which from my understanding is done correctly here and should be serialized into text from the href value), and it seems to not even pick up on this on Discourse even though it implements it too. But I'm assuming these are implementation issues and will either be fixed by Google or worked around on forum software soon.EDIT: it was fixed on NodeBB side: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results/result?id=wCSb0uOG9XPulXXSxHFZnA
The point is, we're probably going to see resurgence of forums in search results. Probably along with more forum spam, but I hope the increased visibility will be worth the moderation burden. And maybe people won't need to add site:reddit.com to google searches soon
Side note: does this mean web 3.0 might actually somewhat succeed due to SEO benefits? I mean the "semantic web" web 3.0, not the cryptocurrency-based "web3" one.
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Hah, didn't I call it when I said that the ride of LLMs and ChatGPT, et al. would mean that actual user-generated content would become all the more valuable? It seems Google is coming to that conclusion too.
Nice catch and thanks for checking on this, will take a look.
Edit: We currently use microdata to present our metadata, so that may need adjusting. Might be when we moved to Harmony that wasn't ported over.
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@julian said in Pushing forums in the AI SEO domination era:
Edit: We currently use microdata to present our metadata, so that may need adjusting. Might be when we moved to Harmony that wasn't ported over.
AFAICT it's Google who isn't following the spec here and the original structured data was valid (e.g. schema.org validator doesn't report any errors with it), but I guess Google has some more strict preferences, and in the end what matters is what Google believes is correct (gotta love monopolies).
Hah, didn't I call it when I said that the ride of LLMs and ChatGPT, et al. would mean that actual user-generated content would become all the more valuable? It seems Google is coming to that conclusion too.
Paid API access support when?
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