Discourse already has a <header>, some <nav> & a <footer> tag, which is great! But it is currently missing the <main> tag. Would it be possible to wrap that around the main topic content?
Thanks,
Joshua
Do you have any reference around how the <main> tag influences SEO?
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Since Discourse already uses the <header>, <nav> & <footer> tag, it would make sense to complete the semantic markup with the <main> tag.
The <main> tag increases usability, the Apple Reader View uses it for example.
Although there’s no hard evidence it has a direct impact on SEO, it does increase usability possibily resulting in better SEO.
John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) states the following:
“but it definitely helps us to better understand pages, so that we can show them better for the appropriate queries in search.”
Source: Semantic HTML Is Not A Google Search Quality Signal
Another quote from John Muller supporting the usability aspect:
John (Submitted Question) 29:48
Right. Cool. Let me run through some of the submitted questions and I’ll get back to those of you with your raised hands as well. Let’s see. The first one I have here is: do I need to mark up content on my page with HTML semantic elements, for example, the footer? Does it help somehow to understand the content for Google?John (Answer) 30:07
I think we talked about this very briefly with headings. But it’s essentially similar here. For some types of elements, it does give us a little bit more context about the content of your page. But things like the footer don’t really give us that much more information. So some amount of semantic HTML definitely makes sense for SEO. It definitely makes sense for usability and for compatibility across different browser types, all of that as well. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s important for SEO.
Source: Google Says Some Semantic HTML Elements Do Make Sense for SEO
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