Breadcrumbs microformat for SEO

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The discussion revolves around implementing the Breadcrumbs microformat for SEO in Discourse. angelim suggests adopting microdata for breadcrumbs to improve hierarchy hints for Google and provide users with a way to access categories from search results. codinghorror confirms that crawler pages can be updated independently, and fantasticfears mentions that Google now prefers microdata over RDFa.

A pull request was submitted (PR #3199) and sam made tweaks to the implementation, including excluding uncategorized items and adding tags. However, codinghorror questions how tags work in this context, as they are not part of a hierarchy. sam explains that tags are appended after categories and were previously omitted from the crawler payload.

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?

2개의 좋아요
Semantic microdata and more content for crawlers
2

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

2개의 좋아요
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).

1개의 좋아요
6

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

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

4개의 좋아요
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..

4개의 좋아요
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

1개의 좋아요
9

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

1개의 좋아요
10

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

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