1081934 - Design what's shown in Google's search results for support forum questions

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(support.mozilla.org :: Questions, task, P2)

Description

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

I as a visitor would like to see more relevant content in Google search results for forum questions

Comment 1

[Derek Ries]

Initial idea for google results/snippets
http://i.imgur.com/JZ83vYN.png

Comment 2

[Rehan Dalal (Inactive)]

Google search docs:
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/snippets

Comment 3

[Rehan Dalal (Inactive)]

Hey Derek,

FYI: I reviewed those developer docs and I don't think that we will be able to implement the additional meta data on SUMO. It looks like it requires you to be a Custom Search partner or it can only be used on Site Search.

Comment 4

[Derek Ries]

Dang, does the Custom Search partner limitation apply to all forms of custom data or just the XML feeds? It's a little ambiguous. I think there were a couple of ways to provide structured data, including one in the HTML called Microformats if I'm remembering correctly. It's probably the same limitation just not explicitly expressed on that page. Oh well.

Comment 5

[Derek Ries]

Yeah Rehan, it looks like you're right. The microformats and other structured data are where Google uses those types of info like:

Reviews
People
Products
Businesses and organizations
Recipes
Events
Music

Comment 7

[Rehan Dalal (Inactive)]

Look into how to make "Last updated" date show up on Google.

Comment 8

[Derek Ries]

Was googling around the other day and stumbled on this.

http://i.imgur.com/3VYOwOt.png

It looks like Google automatically extracts some important links on some content and shows it. So I'm wondering if it's possible to "game" it into showing some links at the bottom that we want to display like the "Ask a Question" or something like that.

Comment 9

[Joni Chan]

It is possible to game that search snippet by adding links, although Google would generally only display links to pages that already get a lot of search traffic and rank highly in search results.

When I worked on SEO for recipe and retail sites, we'd try to "promote" category pages (like "vegetarian") by linking them to the landing page. However, Google would ignore some of these links and promote the ones that already rank highly in search results, so "chicken" and "cake" end up in the snippet. Sometimes, it even skips the link and digs another level deeper, so it would display "vegetarian burger" instead of "vegetarian."

One possible way around this is to make the "AAQ" page more like a search landing page (so make it indexable and have an SEO-friendly page title). If it ends up getting being a ranking page on search, Google might recognize it as an important page and display it in the snippet.

Comment 10

[Rehan Dalal (Inactive)]

PR incoming and bumping to current sprint

Comment 11

[Rehan Dalal (Inactive)]

Landed:
https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/commit/330045920b4e922ed5c31673a73df5f34a3ed0f4

Pushed to prod by me, right now.