SEO

I know that this topic is not a elgg specific topic, but I have been having a huge problem with my sites SEO and I dont know where to turn (The members here seem to be very knowledgeable so I'm giving it a shot)

Here is my issue,

My site can not be found by search engines, at all. even if I type in "my site name" in google it does not come up. Even if i type www.mysitename.com into google it does not come up. Here is what I have tried and researched, but any other suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Firstly my site is on a sub domain www.mysite.com/site. I initially just had a simple html redirect, but after some reasearch I found that adding a 301 redirect in the htaccess file could help SEO. this is what I am using;

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^mysite\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://mysite/site/$1 [R=301,L]

I am using this redirect because some of my users were getting an error that they could not login from a www domain.

I also have;

RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml$ auto_sitemap/index [L]
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xsl$ mod/auto_sitemap/views/default/auto_sitemap/sitemap.xsl [L]
RewriteRule ^sitemapindex.xsl$ mod/auto_sitemap/views/default/auto_sitemap/sitemapindex.xsl [L] 

in the htaccess doc as I tried the sitemap plugin for SEO.

I have checked the robots.txt doc and see that a plugin is adding the following lines to the doc;

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search/

But im not sure if this affects SEO as the site is in a subdomain anyway.

 

  • All these questions about SEO without any substance have to stop.

    Have you considered that your site just has no content that robots would find worthy of bumping in search results? Elgg is meant to be a closed network, and robots are unable to index most of the user-generated content because privacy settings. You can try https://github.com/hypejunction/hypediscovery, it might help with some of content discovery. 

    If you do have problems, go to Google Webmaster/Search console and experiment. Find out what Google wants from you. If there is a specific issue that you need help, ask a specific question.

    robots.txt are ignored on subdomains. What's in the root of the domain? Some WordPress site? If so, then look there. Crawlers only read robots.txt in the root.

  • Thank for the google/webmasters idea. I have now applied to have the site registered with google. I will see what happens from there.

    @Ismayil, I can understand that you get frustrated hearing the same questions over and over, but I am new at this and I can assure you it is new for me.... I admit that my post may have been a bit open ended so let me try and be a little more specific. Is there any reason (setting, or otherwise) that my site could be completely missed by search engines? I don't mean low ranking, I mean missed. 

    To further clarify let me answer your questions, 1) yes I have considered that my site does not have great content, however the site has numerous blogs  which are all public and surly should be found? But again this is not the issue. My concern is that even if i search for "My Site" on google it does not come up. This seems a little strange to me. Secondly There if not site in the main domain (lets not get into this it was a F*$#K Up) So the site is in a subdomain and I use a 301 redirect from the main domain.

  • I can't tell you anything without knowing at least your domain/subdomain. There are plenty of tools online to start debugging the issue. This is definitely not an Elgg related issue, more of a server config issue. You would be better off asking on stackoverflow.

    Once you get it sorted, you can also try https://github.com/hypejunction/hypeseo

  • Cool bananas, I'll give that a shot.

Beginning Developers

Beginning Developers

This space is for newcomers, who wish to build a new plugin or to customize an existing one to their liking