Google indexing issue
It has been a month, and none of the posts I made on my FluentCommunity are indexed, despite my efforts to submit them for indexing. What is the issue, or am I misunderstanding something?
Is your community set to public? Indexing by Google is only carried out if the pages can be accessed without a login.
Yep its public.Google only indexed the space not the content or post posted withing the space
Ndumiso Khoza I think it would be valuable to submit a sitemap.xml to Google in order to index the fCommunity content like: posts/comments, courses and images so Google can understand it better.
Currently if you take a look at the sitemap.xml file here its "empty" and it might include some old regular WP pages but there are no links to fCommunity content/feed.
If there are no links in the sitemap.xml and no links to the fCommunity content from other pages then it might be hard for the google crawler (not mentioning other crawlers like: Bing where they can have difficulties to reneder JS pages) to discover these fCommunity content and index it.
Since each post has its own URL it would be beneficial to have a list of all fCommunity content links listed in sitemap.xml file - this could be achieved by implementing for example: Vue Router Sitemap or any other similar solution so it will help the fCommunity content to be submitted to Google via the sitemap.xml file.
Just because our fCommunity is a Single Page App (SPA) it might take a little bit more effort to be crawled and indexed since the content needs to be indexed first theN rendered and again indexed in the second round.
When a crawler visits your SPA for the first time, it will usually only index what it sees without running JavaScript.
That doesn't mean Google and some other search engines do not execute JavaScript. They do that since about 2015. Google does index content generated by Vue. But crawlers usually only do so on their "second wave of indexing": When they crawl your site initially, they want to index it as efficiently as possible (there are so many new pages to index every day!). They will usually only use more time and resources to execute JavaScript when they come around to your page a second time.
Crawlers have a certain resource budget for your page, called a "crawl budget" that is calculated by how important it thinks your page is, and also check your page load time. As executing your JS uses up more resources, there may not be enough budget left to crawl all of your content. This could results in visibility problems for some of your content.
Ref: link
Note: more technical explanation on SPA can be found here
Pure client-side SPAs are problematic when the app is sensitive to SEO and time-to-content. This is because the browser will receive a largely empty HTML page, and has to wait until the JavaScript is loaded before rendering anything.
Vue provides first-class APIs to "render" a Vue app into HTML strings on the server. This allows the server to send back already-rendered HTML, allowing end users to see the content immediately while the JavaScript is being downloaded. Vue will then "hydrate" the application on the client side to make it interactive. This is called Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and it greatly improves Core Web Vital metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
More tech details for JavaScript SEO Problems and How to Solve Them
It would be also good to have:
- Ref attribute (+link) - all paid external links me marked with Rel=”sponsored” and other links as User Generated Content Rel="UGC" etc.
If you were paid in some way for the link, qualify these links with sponsored or nofollow. If users can insert links on your site (for example, you have a forum section or Q&A site), add ugc or nofollow to these links too.
Ref: link
- Add Meta tags: Robots meta tag: follow, nofollow
- Ability to add the rel="canonical" attribute to links/posts when refering to our main WP pages
- Customize posts URL
- Redirect traffic from deleted posts to other post
Mat Thank you for your insights. After exploring the community, I discovered that posts created using FluentCommunity cannot be indexed, as confirmed by some users. While it is possible to use a plugin and manually add each post link to the sitemap, this approach is tedious and far from ideal.
I have tested several WordPress plugins, but most do not even support FluentCommunity posts in their sitemaps. It has been a frustrating experience trying to get these posts indexed. From an SEO standpoint, this limitation significantly reduces the value of the FluentCommunity plugin, as it prevents me from effectively leveraging organic traffic.
At this point, I am seriously considering discontinuing FluentCommunity, as it does not seem worth the investment under these circumstances. Once again, thank you for your valuable insights.
Ndumiso Khoza I have submitted the idea of auto generated sitemap.xml (it can be a separate sitemap-fcom.xml file so it will be easy to submit to Google via GSC) file creation on the roadmap so users can vote: https://community.wpmanageninja.com/fluentcommunity-roadmp/#/idea/590/
Sitemap.xml file can help indexing the fCommunity content.
In addition... Linking from other indexed already by Google websites or linking from our own WP website to fCommunity content can speed things up because a crawler visiting your main WP will be able to following a link to your fCommunity and index it - try to link your fCommunity with at least one link to your Feed and wait.
Once the crawler will follow at least one link then it might try to guess/visit other important links/posts and index them. List of all Public content in sitemap-fcom.xml file would be the best option IMHO.
As long as the crawler can discovery fCommunity links (the easiest way would by via sitemap-fcom.xml) then your fCommunity will be indexed sooner or later.
This fCommunity is Public and has already a lot of content (and visitors and linked Google Analytic) and also it is linked from other websites so the crawler could come here and indexed it (Google knows about this website from many sources). In a result this fCommunity posts can be visible in SERP.
When it comes to other SEO plugins they won't generated sitemap.xml file for the fCommunity for many reasons - this is still a new plugin etc.
Let hope that the sitemap-fcom.xml ("Public" posts, comments, images, courses) file will be generated one day so we can feed Google easily.
Shahjahan Jewel if possible please implement this feature so all Public fCommunities (and Public content) can be included in the sitemap-fcom.xml fine a d indexed by Google a bit faster and easier. Thanks!
Mat That's wonderful! I have already cast my vote. Thank you once again for your efforts; it is much appreciated🙌.
Ndumiso Khoza no worries we all are in the same boat - there are plenty of suggestions already reported and the fTeam will implement many of them but it will take some time.
Be patient and if there are any issues or missing features just report them here and on a Roadmap - this is the easiest way to make this fCommunity plugin great.