Breadcrumbs microformat for SEO

feature
1

Given the url structure Discourse uses, Google has little hints about the hierarchy of the forum. How about adopting the microdata for breadcrumbs? Discourse already has the categories in the right order rendered in the posts page.

I don’t have any articles to indicate if ranking improves. One of the advantages is to allow the user to get to a particular category from the search results. The breadcrumbs replace the link, just bellow the title.

Screen Shot 2014-04-09 at 7.18.45 PM.png1046×178 17.3 KB

Implementation with microdata is trivial:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Breadcrumb">
  <a href="http://www.example.com/dresses" itemprop="url">
    <span itemprop="title">Dresses</span>
  </a> ›
</div>

My fork points to a private repo out of Github so I don’t know how to send a pull request. Is anyone interested in implementing this?

2 Likes
2

If it is just markup, then probably fine as a pull request.

2 Likes
3

Has anything happened on this front?

4

This is interesting. Discourse serves plain pages for crawlers. For now, it doesn’t include these.

  1. I do want to know whether it’s eligible to add metadata to only these pages, excluding the handlebar templates. You know, Google spider can understand JavaScript…
  2. I prefer RDFa since I heard it all the time. It seems solid.
5

Yes, the crawler pages can be updated independently of everything else. It is quite safe (as long we don’t break crawling… that’d be very bad).

1 Like
6

I followed some blog posts on webmaster. Google prefers microdata now.

PR:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/3199

4 Likes
7

I believe @sam made some tweaks to this, we didn’t like that “categories” was showing up as a breadcrumb itself. Here’s how it looked before that tweak

Seems some results are showing the new format with the changes:

Or maybe that’s only subcategories… perhaps categories aren’t appearing now. Hard to say…

4 Likes
8

I think Google prefers not to show single categories for some crazy reason

The micro data is correct per their current recommendations

I also tweaked this so it does not add uncategorized and does add tags

1 Like
9

Hmm how do tags work? They are not a hierarchy…

1 Like
10

It just appends them after categories, keep in mind, prior to this tags were totally omitted from crawler payload

1 Like