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.
Let's take a look at another perspective
To me that sounds as a viable idea. Since we started with Elgg, we have evolved on the approach of ecosystems with products like rocketchat (OS counterpart of Slack), apache kafka, storm, activemq, mautic and may other great OS initiatives. We have built upon those platforms to enable users and businesses to expand their online presence and make viable business cases. I do not want to discard Elgg as a platform that still has great potential and I have no real interest in SEO per se. It was just a thought that needed attention in my personal opinion. My apologies to Ismayil and all devs for being rude.That was not how my intentions should have been interpreted. Let's fuck SEO and forget about the whole idea :-)
I'd just like to challenge the core developers to embrace their position as a platform of choice to built upon without being charged as annoying. Either way, we (and probably most other users and developers of Elgg) will find our way in the OS world with or without Elgg.
I still think it is worth while to try to do this together since there has been so much effort spend in this project. Please don't say we have to create PR's or contribute, we will if we like to, that is the whole idea of OS and I am pretty sure we have done more than then most of the community users.
Anyway, you still have my support. And if my apologies are accepted, I will be happy to continue to challenge the project and also contribute, if and where we see a match.
Just hang in there. 3.0 is coming out this year and it will be a different Elgg, we are making sure of that. I am personally summarising all of the years of frustration that have accumulated from repetitive tasks like uploading icons and turning them into APIs that will make dev experience more enjoyable. I am spending more time than there hours in the day on doing this work and when you come and throw more things to do my way, I get annoyed. Apology accepted, but at this point this is a personal quest - I want to implement the vision that I have for how Elgg could be - and I am stubborn and unwilling to deal with more distractions that there already are with backward compatibility, thousands of lines of spaghetti code, lack of tests et al. It will all fall into its place, if I manage to complete my 3.0 goals before my back breaks in half or I die of a heart attack smoking my 25th cigarette for the day. For now I need to finish all the UI work that I have laid out for myself, a new search service, and a bunch of other things that keep popping up. I have spent my day off today fixing issues with our builds due to outdated sniffs, so it's upsetting to hear "you are doing it all wrong, SEO sucks".
And everybody needs to start embracing that Elgg is a developer framework, and there will be less and less out-of-the-way box a-la Facebook plug-n-play features. We are building a versatile foundation (an ecosystem if you will) for plugin authors to write whatever they want, be it a publishing platform with an impressive SEO score or a closed network for suicidal teenagers or a crowd funding platform or a social marketplace or next Instagram or next Twitter or something that noone has done before.
A not yet complete list of changes in 3.0: https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg/blob/master/docs/guides/upgrading.rst#id30
As you can see it's a lot of work and Elgg is not stagnating. We are holding off the release candidate until we roll out a revamped mobile-first theme
- Previous
- 1
- 2
- Next
You must log in to post replies.