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Technical SEO tips for LET to improve traffic
Some of these have little or no effect on rankings and traffic, however some do. I'm just posting several things off the top of my head, others are welcome to comment also!
- register the domain for 5-10 years (instead of yearly renewal)
- get off GoDaddy for too many reasons to list
- security headers are good but HSTS should be 6+ months minimum (can adjust in Cloudflare)
- setup DNSSEC after ditching GoDaddy
- clarify ownership of the website in the footer, About, policy pages, etc
- link to LET from the parent company's website(s)
- consider public WHOIS after steps above
- company profiles on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and such would clarify the "entity"
- fully responsive Vanilla theme is sorely needed instead of device detection, which is possibly the most important thing on this list in terms of boosting rankings...
- linking related topic threads to each other could help in multiple ways
- do not accept banner Ads that try to emulate UI menus
- all search result queries should be noindexed
- consistent URL structure... remove the trailing "forward slash" on relevant pages
- implement rel="sponsored" on paid Ads
- consider removing the LowEndBox site-wide link in header nav
- remove the years-old Twitter embed widget in footer and just link the Twitter icon instead
- remove the years-old Google Analytics scripts
- remove the site-wide reCaptcha scripts
What else can you guys think of?
Thanked by 1nick_
Comments
I only think that Google Search rarely produces forums in its SERP. Most likely it would give me the usual "How to decompress a ZIP file in 10 easy steps. With pictures!"
What in the..
All points are good, except that SEO is dead. it's pay to win now, the top results are most from big players or paying ads,
First the SEO guidelines forced everyone to use structured data, schema etc. Then they scraped the content creators to feed AI, and with the recent algorithm update Big-G demoted small/medium publishers from SERP. Even you somehow manage to rank in the top 10, there will be barely any click-through since the excerpt from your content will be shown in the results page, an average joe gets the quick info they wanted, they'll be less likely to visit the web page.
Yes and no, see below.
You're not wrong, SEO has been rather depressing the past few years...
However, UGC (user-generated content) like discussion forums, especially aged forums with domain authority like LET, are seeing massive traffic growth after the HCU algorithm changes that Google rolled out.
For example:
Ranks #1 for "lowendtalk vs lowendbox"
https://slickstack.io/forum/topic/lowendspirit-vs-lowendbox-vs-lowendtalk-difference
Ranks on page 2 for "lowendtalk" which is kinda nuts!
https://slickstack.io/forum/topic/are-vps-providers-on-lowendbox-lowendtalk-legit
And our forum is just a few years old.
If LET made some of the changes mentioned above, I think they could double their current traffic, especially by focusing on a mobile-first responsive layout.
Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content
https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/google-now-defaults-to-not-indexing-your-content/
The best of all search engines must be Baidu, half the content is served from baidu.com itself. Hard to rank #1 within the walled garden.
https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+tips+lowendtalk
This thread was indexed by Google less than 1 hour after I first posted it. If your website has strong domain authority, UGC threads are still indexed (and ranked) very rapidly!
We discussed indexing challenges with blog posts last year though, inspired by this Hacker News thread from June 2023... tl;dr, single-author articles on low DA websites have the most trouble:
https://slickstack.io/forum/topic/google-is-no-longer-indexing-many-blog-posts-anymore
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195600