We are doing so much wrong in terms of SEO, this needs attention

I wrote a plugin for seo to make relevant meta tags so your website can be found in Google. While this helps, it is nearly sufficient to really get you higher in search rankings.

Why is that, and why did I make that plugin in the first place?

I made the plugin as a starter for SEO optimization. To make proper metatags for all sorts of content. But this is basics. It will not really get you ranking high. Why not ?

Because much more things are relevant to become higher ranked. For instance, alt image tags, h1 tags, reactions, video tags and much more. There are several books , videos and websites to help you with that. But the basic problem is, that elgg is not really helping. Why not ?

Elgg is discouraging media content to be part of your website. For instance you cannot paste images or videos in pages and blogs. Because of security is the answer, security is good but should not interfere with functionality.

And even if you could get a picture or video include with third party plugins, there is no way you can add meta content to it.

I for sure want to help with that and will start by adding meta content to video with our video plugin. But we need more help from core and other third party devs. My call is to open up elgg for SEO and optimize URL's, headings, multimedia and bring us into the world of google. The elgg.org site is getting lower rankings every year, not because the platform itself is becoming less relevant, but because it lacks focus from dev's to market it while they can.

Elgg even fails to support commenting from visitors, social or not. This is a basic functionality for wordpress or any social engaged platform.

I think that no software, product or community can thrive these days without minimal support for SEO. So let's have some attention to that, instead of other also important bug fixes and functionality improvements.

I'd like your opinion, even if not aligned with mine. I might learn too.

  • If you feel Elgg is lacking in certain features, there are two things you can do about it.

    1. Raise awareness like you are doing here on the community and hope some developer will help you out and maybe get the feature in core.

    2. And/or improve Elgg by making the feature and make a PR on core. If your code looks good most likely it'll be accepted into core and everybody benefits.

  • Elgg is a rapid development framework and it allows you to accomplish all of the above goals. How often do you see search results from Facebook in your Google search results? That is almost never.

  • Fyi, there is currently only 3-4 people actively maintaining Elgg. Unless you get your hands dirty and contribute code, Elgg won't become miraculously search-engine friendly and no amount of complaining or discussion is going to change that.

  • I know :-) You can help too Jerome, your plugin blog tools for instance has a nice feature to add pictures, but you cannot add meta data to it like title and alt tags.

    I also think that this feature should be part of core and not a plugin. Same for video which cannot be added without using plugins. Having the ability to add rich content and basic SEO features is a must have for a CMS/social networking engine like Elgg.

    I know you can add pictures, but the way it is implemented is quite strange and my experience is that most users do not understand why this is done the way it is. And therefore seldom used because it is too complicated.

  • Nothing is a must. I have worked on a few dozen large and small social networks, and all are different and all have different needs. As long as Elgg can accommodate these needs, I am not bothered. There is many good-to-have features, but a) it takes people to conceptualize them, b) it takes people to develop them, c) it takes people to maintain them. As of late, I am throwing out as much as I can out of core - I don't want to maintain some brilliant idea written 10 years ago. If you feel strongly about anything, develop it and make a pull request. We know all the shortcomings that Elgg has, and yes I understand that metatags and such are wonderful features to have, but you have to understand that it's not just bake up something half-ass tolerable and let thousands of people rely on that feature. We are writing a framework, so it has to be robust and versatile. To add entity metatags, we first have to rewrite the routing engine, throw away all the global magic, rewrite layouts and pagehandlers etc. WYSIWYG and embedding is a completely different story - HTML inputs should die, but the likes of Tumblr and Medium have thousands of developers working them rolling out non-HTML cross-browser compatible safe editors, we don't have those resource, so you have to rely on a upside-down CKEditor. I am not very pleased with it either and have been working and experimenting with other approaches, I have ideas, but not time to implement them. I am always available for hire if you want to invest 100 hours of development time into making things betters.

  • Ismayil, I know you are busy but the purpose of a feedback topic is to give feedback (duh). I am giving that. If you don't want that and want to determine the course of Elgg with core and core only you should stop asking for feedback and close the topic.

    It seems that you agree that it is needed but takes a lot of time so i suggest take the second part of this topic (planning and put it somewhere on a roadmap).

    As to contributing. I am contributing, I wrote the damn plugin for SEO, which I regret since Elgg has hardly any plugin written the same (even for core) and you can dig into almost every plugin to figure out how to create meta data.

    I don't need your commercial help for this. We have 6 developers and we could easily make whatever we want in Elgg.

    As to comment vs feedback. Most feedback is a complaint even if it is written as a compliment, there is always a but....

    If there is nothing to complain anymore change the topic to compliments only discussion :-)

  • 1. https://elgg.org/plugins/2626263

    2. Thanks for your feedback, but as I said, it's a DIY situation. I don't care about SEO at this point, as there far more pressing issues to address. There are too many people offering feedback, and no one doing anything about it.

    3. With 6 developers using Elgg to make money, you could contribute back to Elgg core development. It's easy to make money off a product and then complain that it's not what you want.

    4. I have written over 150 plugins and that doesn't stop me from contributing and improving the core, on top of working full time. So, the conclusion is I am an idealistic and altruistic idiot.

  • Our developers are by far not only working with Elgg and we have also created a lot of plugins that we shared.While any of them can create plugins or work on core, I was merely stating that we can create whatever we want and that is also what we are doing but not with Elgg (mostly).

    And I don't complain often, this is maybe the first complaint/feedback in years.

    But if Elgg is not moving towards its users, users move away from Elgg.

    And sure I appreciate your relentless effort to Elgg and offcourse you guys need to decide on priority. But don't throw valuable feedback away.

    BTW; I tested your pluging, but that is not even close to what is required here. Look at wordpress on how to do this properly.

    Anyway, I think we are done with this topic. I will keep my mouth shut and continue my work and still try to help with my team now and then. Have a nice weekend !

  • Elgg is designed as a closed access-controlled system, not a public facing CMS. If you have concrete examples of what can be done in core, open a ticket on Github. These broad discussions are not helping anyone, especially those that can already do everything they want.

     

  • Thanks for clearing that up. I was under the impression that it was not targeting closed communities. As stated earlier, close the topic. There is no need to open a ticket giving that strategy.

Feedback and Planning

Feedback and Planning

Discussions about the past, present, and future of Elgg and this community site.