Is there Sitemap.xml and is it needed?
Related to Google SEO: does taptalk offer a forum sitemap.xml? And if not, is it required for good Google indexing of the forum? What is the recommended approach?
In reply toMr.Nobody⬆:KajMagnus @KajMagnus2021-08-27 08:57:56.677ZCurrently there isn't. I think it's not needed, because at the end of the topic index pages, there's a Load More link and via it, Googlebot should be able to find all publicly visible pages.
At the same time, I'd think it's good with a sitemap too, so there're two ways for Googlebot to find all pages. I'll set this topic to "Plan to fix"
@Mr.NobodyAgree, I did some more research on this and it really seems like a sitemap does not really make a difference anymore nowadays.
So this feels like a low priority feature. Don't worry about it anytime soon :)
KajMagnus @KajMagnus2021-08-27 13:24:12.744ZOk :- ) (If you happen to still have some browser tabs open with relevant articles or something, it'd be interesting to have a look (if you share the URLs?). Or I can just websearch for "sitemap ...")
- @Mr.Nobody
If you happen to still have some browser tabs open with relevant articles or something, it'd be interesting to have a look
Sure :) I stopped at this article which quotes it's opinions on things the google staff really said (which gave me a bit more trust than other articles). It also goes into sitemap structuring options etc:
https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/22867/seo-sitemaps/However, some quotes come from really old google videos (2010-2017), so even though the article seems to be new, the content might be a bit outdated.
The key takeaway from everything I found seems to be:
- Google's main objective is that users, when visiting a page, have an easy time to find what they need.
- An example of a badly implemented webpage would be one where many pages can't be reached through any form of main menu structure, forcing users to click through multiple pages before reaching the content they are looking for. But since your forum has all links in the "category", all posts have a direct link to be reached by users and robots.
- In Talkyard the forum categories seem to do that job.
- So maybe just focus on making sure that the links for: New, popular, recently activity, most votes, are easy to follow by google robots. That way, all "important" content will keep getting re-crawled (even if an old topic changes title, for example, since usually will also get a comment or a vote or something that makes it move up again).
- Progresswith handling this problem