Improving SEO on Steem and steemit.com
Hello Steemians, today we’d like to talk about how SEO is improving for Steem developers thanks to a proposal that originated with @jesta, which was followed by an implementation by Smittyvb (@smitop on Steem).
The Problem
As the first and largest application leveraging the Steem blockchain, steemit.com often receives preferential treatment when it comes to the Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP). When a search engine “sees” the same piece of content in multiple locations on the internet, it needs to determine which source is authoritative. Google uses over 200 metrics to make this determination, but it is likely that because steemit.com is so established, it has a strong competitive advantage with respect to SERP rank for a given piece of content.
Steem is More Than Steemit.com
None of this was a problem as long as steemit.com was the only application built on Steem. However, as we have seen over the course of the last two years, Steem has such compelling value propositions from the perspective of application developers that hundreds of applications now leverage the Steem blockchain, with more coming online every day. In order to make Steem an even more hospitable environment for these apps, we felt it was important to resolve this problem by implementing an open standard for “canonical URLs.”
Steemscript and Canonical URLs
While @jesta began the conversation, other github users made significant contributions as well. @smittyvb submitted the PR for formatting canonical URLs according to steemscript which is an open JSON standard for trusted workflows developed by @bonustrack. Most frontends have been specifying the originating app on each post for some time, but now we have an open standard for signalling to Google and other indexers the authoritative (canonical) URL of any Steem post. This will help give “link juice” to the originating apps.
Helping steemit.com and Steem
Because the content hosted on steemit.com is mirrored in so many locations on the internet, it too is likely not enjoying the maximum benefit of search engine algorithms because they have no way of “knowing” what content truly originated from steemit.com. This change will create an environment where the origins of every piece of content are clearly presented for the algorithms and in a “language” they understand. This ensures that their map of the Steem ecosystem is accurate, which makes for a more healthy environment for growth.
The Importance of Open Standards
Without open standards, the internet would not have been able to function and scale to its current size. Like the internet, Steem is an open source framework designed to foster communication among people all over the world through their computers. We want to ensure this network is able to get as big as possible, and store as much valuable information as possible. But as networks scale they become exponentially more complex. Open standards enable everyone who is relying on a network architecture to collaborate and ensure that the foundational components of the network are antifragile and interoperable, so that we are free to build even more valuable applications on top of that foundation.
We believe that Steem is far-and-away the best blockchain protocol for web developers and it is changes like this that help our network increase its lead while scaling. If you’d like to learn more about developing applications on Steem, be sure to check out our dev portal: https://developers.steem.io
Steemit Team
This is wonderful work. The simple fact that steemit blogs are already very google searchable is a great promotion for steemit.
It seems like that developers know their stuff when it comes to improving steemit on other search engines. I have noticed that our own search engine is pretty much non functional. I imagine that it would take some real significant work to build it into a functioning search engine. Are there any plans to do something about the steemit internal search engine?
I love you guys. This is exactly what was needed for @TokenBB and @SteemPress to thrive!
Sure. Every dApp on the blockchain needs this actually.
How is that going ? releasing soon?
How does one man be in so many places and still remain sane? Teach me your ways.
I'm an octopus lol
Ramping up @Steemit canonical work is excellent for 301 redirects.
Fortunately, there was sufficient voting power to make this "invisible" post visible.
Are you guys reading my website? Cause I just wrote about this. 😉
Can I add a request? I noticed that posts above $10 or so get "follow" links, while those below are "no follow".
Having a threshold makes sense, but my recent post went from nearly $11 down to $9, and lost the "follow" link it had for a few days.
Maybe make it permanent? I lost a good backlink because of price dropping... I'm not the only one.
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Same here. I really hate that nofollow tag. It's not easy to earn more than $10 payout for posts now. Can @steemitblog look at adjusting that? Lower the payout to say $5?
It would be nice if there were a couple thresholds that would be ok, for instance an equivalent of X amount of Steem ($10 is currently about 14.5 Steem!) That would be price agnostic, as well as a smaller threshold for posts with high engagement or high number of likes.
There is more than one way to determine if a post is quality or not!
I was surprised that this was not mentioned in clear terms. After getting to know this I am bumping up all my posts with promotions. But I feel it is still inclined towards whales and biggies. We need to have a way where Good content from newbies also gets follow link and better visibility.
This is where you just go ninja and post a response to your own posts with a link. 😉
OMG, this is long overdue. All dApps should at the very least use one tag to identify where content was posted to the blockchain.
Then the other dApp owners have something to work with.
Better late than never.
Maybe well start to see some ranking improvements too - https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@just2random/could-this-be-the-real-reason-why-steemit-s-alexa-rank-is-falling
Yeah, I have this in mind too. It's good that we have these apps built on steem but the problem is not much of the users from these apps bring quality like how Steemit was envisioned to be a platform for authors.
Very nice! =) But can tell me someone where i can submit a app to this apps.json? I'm trying to develop some kind of app and im curious about that.^^
I've seen this mentioned elsewhere. Someone thought it might actually harm our posts that they are replicated across multiple sites and so might even look like plagiarism. It's another challenge to solve. I hope you can work with the others building sites around Steem to fix this.
This is something I often wondered, how replicated posts might harm the SEO. Does reposting original content from another url on Steemit confuse the algorithm? @SteemPress
Not really. What is morenlikely to happen is that alternative frontends just never rank.
Because of the authoritative DA of Steemit, Steemit probably doesn’t suffer from such. There’s not a big problem if a majority are internal links and if that is also consolidated by other links to Steemit on other front-ends.
The problem is solely that when you look in Google for unique Steem account names only Steemit will rank for that profile. Such is the strength of Steemit being the largest, oldest, and the site benefitting most incoming links.
All the other front-ends probably suffer a huge duplicate content penalty for it.
Canonical will now allow alternative front-ends to respect what was the originating app is what posted from and should thus be the site benefitting the search engine traffic as “original publication source”.
Without alternative front-ends suffering a duplicate content penalty (Ignatius they have implemented the canonical tag).
Please excuse my ignorance, but can someone post the meaning of "SEO" for those of us who are not familiar with the term?
Edit: As I was writing this, it became clear that it probably stands for Search Engine Optimization. Correct me if I am wrong.
SEO
This is a good example of why we shouldn't make assumptions while writing. I also generally suffer from this oversight.
Yeah me too. I think the general rule is to spell it out on the first use with the acronym in parentheses then to use the acronym or abbreviation after that.
Im not mad though, but it is a good practice to follow.
Yep, that's what it stands for.
Great work guys. I see people complaining here, as usual... but content created on dApps that are built on the Steem blockchain, needs to have a clear origin. By increasing the SEO of content created for platforms other than Steemit itself, the Steem blockchain becomes stronger and more decentralised.
Of course hardfork 20 and SMTs are going to be huge, but don’t underestimate the impact that subtle SEO changes that make dApps more appealing to use and develop, can have.
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Steem is now near all time low prices (in BTC). Something must be done.
Steem is now lower than it was for most of 2016 even. On one hand this is probably the best time ever to buy Steem via dollar cost averaging (not investment advice) but then at the same time for people holding a lot of Steem it is one of the worst times ever to sell it.
Anyone who bought or earned it is probably looking at the current prices as pure lunatic prices to sell from. When was the last time you saw Steem going for 0.00010764 BTC ?!