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.
- Google can more easily process the forum content with referenced indexable profile pages:
- For “disambiguation” Google really needs at least any kind of reference to the author - even if it is not indexable:
- There is a schema draft for a minimal profile page:
- 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.
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:
Then the profile page URLs can become indexable again.