sobrenome

@Matt Yesterday I ran a crawl with the same tool as you and saw that all clubs for example aren't in sitemap. What could be the reason?

There is a radical reduction to page views after the upgrade from 35.000 to 4.400 views.

What are you using to monitor that metric? It generally takes weeks for Google to adjust the index after a change like this, so I'd be surprised if it was impacting page views unless there were errors, etc.

Thanks for the feedback 🙂

We do use canonical tags heavily. However, the "do=getNewComment" style links cannot be canonicalised because they are just 301 redirects to another page.

Canonical links have a place, but they still eat up crawl budget because Google has to index the page to see the tag and then decide what to do with it.

We certainly are not telling Google "get off my site" - we are just strongly hinting to Google what we see as valuable parts of the site, and what we do not. Things like profile pages, redirect links and so on just eat up the budget for almost no return.

@Matt
Please don't get me wrong, i'm happy that this has been adressed. Thanks for that.
But i think you missed out on something very important here.
Canonical Tag

It would make sense to apply canonical tags wherever possible before un-indexing thousands of pages.
Also robots.txt doesn't mean search engines won't index it. Other pages linking to these specific pages means that the search engine will still index them despite your given instructions. That's why robots.txt most of the time isn't recommended to be used.
Here's how to consolidate duplicate URLs:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls
All major search engines highly recommend canonical tags instead of:
# Block faceted pages and 301 redirect pages Disallow: /*?sortby= Disallow: /*?filter= Disallow: /*?tab=comments Disallow: /*?do=findComment Disallow: /*?do=getLastComment Disallow: /*?do=getNewComment You're basically telling the Search Engines to "get off my website", rather than saying which are the important pages.
 
 

I agree with Sonya.
1. Better URL editing structure across forums, pages and clubs. Should be able to edit without limitation.
2. Availability to edit any forum categories, forum posts and clubs cats with meta descriptions, meta titles (needs to be different against the H1 title) for an example. (Should all be in one tool) male it easy without too many editing steps.
3. Option to add a no index, no follow, index follow across the whole site in theory would be better to have control over this however you guys listened to us regarding profiles amd various other things you will auto disclude which is great as the search engine results are not great. Good content is missing.
It's worth to mention that there can be automated rules to apply to forum posts, for example a noindex, no follow would apply for forum posts with less than 300 characters and so on.  I could go on for weeks about the seo,ux and market but won't as I have a habit of boring people. 😛
 

Looks like a nice Christmas present is on the way!
You mention in the rules that an achievement can be granted for a purchase of a product or package… does this by any chance also apply to donations?  If so, you’re going to solve a big problem for me. 🙂 
I like your example about getting an achievement for buying a tshirt… it would be super cool if we could reverse that.  Meaning if they get an achievement be able to give the member something (like a tshirt)!  In this case maybe have the ability to issue a credit to the member account or allow them to make a one time free purchase etc. Think of that “Super Helpful” badge being able to give them a prize as well. 

Very import update! Good job!

@Matt Really great, we really appreaciate the incredible effort put into improving this. Just one suggestion, to leave a way for us to add custom lines to the robots.txt in addition the optimized version (from the screenshot above, I got the impression that we can only select between optimized vs custom). So this options would create the optimized robots.txt + add the extra lines we configure manually. Because we have some custom directives to slow down or ban some bad crawlers that we wish to keep.

Yes 🙂 If there is an existing robots.txt file, this is detected and you are promoted to download the file so you can manually add the rules to your existing file. 

Awesome work, @Matt!! Looking forward to us releasing this update into the wild. SEO improvements ftw 🙌 

Oh my! 😱
This is very impressive!
Thank you so much for such an incredible update. Amazing!

This is crucial for presence in search results. Thanks for addressing it! 

All jokes aside, stock replies could be used as a means of bringing structure and consistency to a group of moderators and admins.  Some sites might stick to the exact wording that has been decided upon for various stock replies and other sites might randomly replace some of the sentences with alternative versions to mix things up so the replies don't seem so impersonal and formulaic. For VIP members a site might decide to forgo using stock replies entirely and truly personalize each and every communication. 

Thank you for bringing this new feature to our attention, %AUTHOR%.
We will investigate the feature, and if we decide to implement it, we will do so in a future maintenance window.
Thanks again, %AUTHOR%!
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ How did we do? Rate our form letter and enter for a chance to win a t-shirt!

As the functionality stands now you get a running list of Stock Replies that you have to scroll through to "hopefully find one that is appropriate for the area you are in currently.

It would be nice if IPS created categories that you populate in the ACP and then choose on the front end to find a set of Stock Replies pertinent to a particular use case.

 
Once you click on a category it would bring up a list of relevant Stock Replies you could choose from.
Access to each category would be set in the ACP and would only appear on the frontend if the user had the appropriate permission.   
 

To enable the use of stock replies you are prompted through a series of configuration steps.  The first step being to add a button to the small, medium and large toolbars.  I'm stuck on this step as I don't see a button that jumps out at me as being the one to choose. What seems obvious to IPS developers and even you my fine friend aren't always obvious to me.

Just tested and it is like I said: the button STOCK REPLIES will only appear after you add at least one stock reply:

 
 

 

Could someone please provide a clue as to where to find the button to add to the editor.  I hovered over each of the buttons not on the editor and none of them seemed to be a match.

Didn’t test yet. Probably you need to add the stock replies first? Also go to the Toolbars menu and add the button.

Put the following in your constants.php file (or create one).
<?php
\define('USE_DEVELOPMENT_BUILDS','TRUE');
Navigate to "Applications" in your ACP and click on "Check for Updates".
You should see a banner show up alerting you of the existence of beta releases.  You can upgrade your board (or not) as you wish.  To remove prompting for betas you simply replace "TRUE" with "FALSE" or delete that line from your constants.php file.
As with any release please do a complete backup of your site as there is a possibility that the upgrade will encounter an issue. If you do encounter an issue you can always restore from backup and wait for the next beta or full release.  

How safe are the Betas to run? Do you have to manually upload them, or can the upgrader be used? Also do you release many betas or skip directly to release, or it that based off if errors are reported? Do the betas typically run for a few weeks before final release or are the typically fast? Just trying to decided if I should move over, since it looks like it has some fixes I might be interested in. 

Ok now that I see this in action - wow it's fantastic.
( give us an inch we'll want a mile )
I could really see the need for by GROUP allow individuals to customize their set of stock replies.

Is there an answer for this - other than a snarky "test it"?

Just upgraded to latest release and all went well.