Applying Schema.org on the user profile page for improved author authority on Google

Feature
12

Should Discourse serve an indexable profile page?

There are different opinions around the pros/cons of indexable profile pages.
I summarize some of them to make a point on adding a minimalistic indexable profile page.

  1. Google can more easily process the forum content with referenced indexable profile pages:
  1. For “disambiguation” Google really needs at least any kind of reference to the author - even if it is not indexable:
  1. There is a schema draft for a minimal profile page:
  1. No big additional load on Discourse with indexable profile pages:

Google is already crawling the profile URLs, gets a response with HTTP-header X-Robots-Tag: noindex and then throws the result away.

Screenshot Google Search Console --> Excluded by 'noindex' tag (click to open)

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By serving a minimalistic profile page Google can at least use the result somehow.

My conclusion

Add a cralwer_view for profile pages which shows just a minimalistic schema markup – no additional information needed.
The minimalistic schema markup should resemble exactly the data which is already presented in schema data on every post as attribute author:

<html>
  <body itemtype="https://schema.org/ProfilePage" itemscope>
    <span itemprop="mainEntity" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope>
      <a itemprop="url" href='https://meta.discourse.org/u/{user_name}'>
        <span itemprop='name'>{user_name}</span>
      </a>
    </span>
  </body>
</html>

This is a valid “Profile page” - see this example on search.google.com/test/rich-results:

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Then the profile page URLs can become indexable again.

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