Has anyone had any success with creating a category that isn’t included in the main feed strictly to post SEO pages for Google? Topics and threads that would seem click bait type that members wouldn’t be interested in but would get better outside traffic?
Nah. That isn’t very civilized. As Discourse is about improving the user experience, methods that encourage clickbait are not going to work with the software. 
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I don’t see it as clickbait per say. I also don’t have the flags set where it would be removed.
Titles in discourse do very well in SEO it seems. At least alot of threads made seem to do very well.
However there are some topics and titles that would sound “fake” or unnatural but do well for blog when considering seo.
Instead of these popping up in latest, I’m talking about in its own category that would not be included in latest but it would allow crawlers to search and index thus sending more traffic to the site. Something were staff and veteran members would know this category is meant for those type of seo tactics.
Wouldn’t you achieve the same thing by being able to edit the Title Tag?
In any case, this doesn’t sound like a feature we’d like in core. It’s plugin territory.
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What I’ve found the tags aren’t working in favor of the seo right now. At least not for my site. I’m getting top 10 of Google by title. Those with less in title and same words tagged don’t even show up.
I’m not asking for a core feature but I’m looking at the practice. I see a category can be removed from being shown up in latest by being suppressed from home page. Thus putting threads with seo targeting into that category only should increase overall site traffic.
It’s just a tactic not a feature. I’m not sure what suppressing the category from the home page would do verus allowing it.
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Aside from that, just try it out. You care about popularity in Google results, so you ought to run your own experiments, and then report back.
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Im trying it out right now and will see what it does in a few days. But as they say in marketing every idea isnt a new idea, its just a new idea to that person. I was wondering if anyone on here had done this previously.
These “tactics” are exactly what search engines punish.
Search engines make money on ads, and they serve ads to customers that use them because they give accurate results. If you are trying to write something because it lists higher up, but doesn’t have substance, eventually search engines will figure it out and your site will be treated appropriately.
But more than that, it makes the web worse. Please don’t make the web worse. Every time you try an “SEO tactic”, a kitten goes prematurely bald.
Citation, please. I searched for that quote and can’t find it. Apparently the people that said it didn’t publish it in a way that search engines like…
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Proof that they punish these tactics since in key words I look up all are using the same titles, and basic information in the top 5.
You want a citation? Take a business marketing class.
Not sure what the sentence meant, but why would you copy information that already exists, and which is easily findable with an online search, and think you will be placed at the top? That info is already out there, and if you are trying to move in on it, your content has to be more useful to the users of the search engine.
That question was rhetorical, by the way. I can tell you don’t like this discussion, because you came here asking for others’ research, and I am just telling ya it is a bad idea that hurts the web.
Will they teach me what a citation is? 
Seems you think it means copy and paste all the same info. Maybe that’s all you know how to do. I’m strictly talking about a thread that is seo optimized to get traffic to the site that doesn’t fit into a thread members would see. You don’t seem to understand this.
Seo is a field in itself. And yes when the market I am after is in a certain category I go after that market and placement. For my site sponsors as well as it keeps them paying me monthly. People search them. They find us. And what we say about them, reviews etc.
In vbulletin we accomplished this with other pages. Here the setup is Different. So why wouldn’t I ask if anyone here has tried it?
You seem bothered by the idea of going after top spots in search engines thru discourse.
The best way to influence the attendance of a site is to make a website for people, constantly improving the quality of the site itself. This is the content of the site, site usability. Paying attention solely to SEO alone and trying to influence search in order to manipulate its results is not the best idea.
Of course, you can make some changes to the site engine. For example, to forbid to integrate, some pages that can be recognized as duplicates (Tags…).
To create something specifically for ranking purposes, if I understood correctly, it is not worth it.
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Where did I say I was paying attention to SEO alone?
Ive actually modded and changed my site where the users are happy with how its running now. We get new people regularly but obviously I want more and wider audience for site sponsors. I listen to my advertisers as well as I listen to members. As I implemented this I even put a post out and had members input to those posts and they were fine with it. Sponsors pay for monthly banners based on the traffic as well as the members. In this sense I look at seo in terms of traffic.
Im actually curious. If you pay no attention to seo and just site usability on your sites, how are you advertising or how are people finding your site?
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Place a unique, interesting material that is useful to users. I have a social network that is completely closed for indexing. But thanks to unique, interesting materials, amazing people who are there, the number of participants is growing very quickly.
Usually the search engines (For example, the Nutch engine, with which I am familiar) are pursuing similar goals. The quality of the site, this is important, and sooner or later the site will be on the first positions in the search. No one calls to abandon the people who came through the search engines. I just say that at times a lot of people spend a lot of time, effort, and then get to the bans to search engine, they wonder why it happened.
In the case of this platform, I think it is worth looking at (if there is access) to the search index. There are duplicates? What pages are missing? What pages the search engine marked, how not high-quality. Understand this, decide why. I just advise you to start with this.
I apologize for this translation with the help of Google translator.
For a search engine to see a post in Discourse it must be in an “everyone” has “read” permission category and the forum must not be “logged in required”.
This means that for search engines to be able to see it, forum members will also be able to see it. The only way around this would be to have some JavaScript code that hides a post from logged in users. Doing so is against webmaster guidelines and could result in a penalty.
If you post a “hot issue topic”, for example “Charlottesville”, that has nothing to do with the forum’s niche and was posted only for the purpose of getting traffic from searches, you run the risk of having people being disappointed that the forum has little to do with the post they clicked to. You may get page views, but it will do little to benefit the forums community as they will be unlikely to join it. You also run the risk of polluting the forums niche which could devalue its “authority”.
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Interesting. And what template is given to the search engine? The fact is, the index of google differs significantly from the visible part of the html on the site.
For the experiment, I placed the html code in the discovery.hbs template. It is not in the index.
In other words, any changes to the central page of the site are simply not visible to the search engine.
Visit your site with Javascript off. I think that if you change your User Agent to whatever the Google crawler is, you’ll get what Google sees.
I look through the instrument: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch-details
There are: View as Googlebot
This is in real time.
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How in this file?
\app\views\layouts\crawler.html.erb
Central page of the site (/latest) add your own tag?
How do I redefine a file in a plugin?
Here’s what the search engine sees for the site’s central page (https://meta.discourse.org/)
***
</head>
<body class="crawler">
<header>
<a href="/"><img ****></a>
</header>
<div id="main-outlet" class="wrap">
<div class='topic-list' itemscope itemtype='http://schema.org/ItemList'>
<meta itemprop='itemListOrder' content='http://schema.org/ItemListOrderDescending'>
***
For this page, everything is fine (There is a h1 tag)
https://meta.discourse.org/t/google-seo-ideas/67951
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