29 Aug, 2021

Last edited: 01 Jul, 2024, 10:33 PM

Link previews and SEO

Any Network Site built on the MainCross system is search engine friendly, and is highly optimized for search engines to crawl and find required meta tags across posts, pages, channels, profiles, etc - in short every single destination. Every destination from your network can be individually shared, and crawled by a search engine.

All destinations (posts, pages, channels, profiles, etc) produce rich meaningful link previews when shared on other platforms or services.

Meta tags#

There are 3 sets of tags that are automatically filled:

1. Basic meta tags - title, description
2. Open Graph tags - locale, site_name, title, url, description, image, type and even image sizes are meticulously filled out
3. Twitter tags - card, title, url, description, and image

Title / heading fields from the destination goes into meta title fields.

Short description or summary fields go into meta description fields

Main or featured images where available go into meta image fields

And so on for all the other meta tags based on the information that is available.

Image captions are automatically turned into image alt texts.

These measures create better visibility of your network and give it more SEO juice.

Canonical content

Meta tags also take care for duplicate content when syndicating or cross posting.

Headings#

Each page has only the correct hierarchy of HTML Header tags: H1, H2, H3 etc. There is only 1 H1 tag on the page which maps to the Title of the content, and then the relevant H2, H3 tags follow. This helps search engines understand and prioritize the page content easier, and of course makes it easier for your audience to read.

Structured data#

Search engines uses structured data to understand the content of a page - these are explicit clues about the meaning of a page. Structured data is an advanced, standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.

Structured data for relevant page and content types is automatically created by the MainCross system using standardized schemas from schema.org, in the JSON-LD format. JSON-LD is the best format as compared to other choices: Microdata or RDFa.

As an example, examination of this page by a search engine bot / crawler / spider would show the following schema.

<script type="application/ld+json" data-rh="true">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "articleSection": "Help page",
  "headline": "Link previews and SEO",
  "abstract": "Every post, page & destination is optimized for SEO and link preview goodness for individual sharing and SEO juice.",
  "image": [
    "https://mc-store1.s3.amazonaws.com/media/ugc-images/articles/00001958.jpg"
  ],
  "datePublished": "2021-08-29T08:55:16.787000Z",
  "dateModified": "2024-06-28T21:27:13.829648Z",
  "author": [
    {
      "@type": "Organization",
      "name": "MainCross Social+",
      "url": "https://www.maincross.net/@maincross"
    }
  ]
}
</script>

A validation of this page's URL with relevant search engine tools shows that it has been correctly recognized as an "Article".

Many different kinds of structured data are added to each page depending on what is the main entity on the page:

Article

This markup informs the search engine that the content is to be treated like website pages, or news / blog articles. It is used for all Pages, and Posts authored by Heroes and Champions.

Structured data for the Author (Person or Organization) is also part of the markup.

SocialMediaPosting

This markup informs the search engine that the content is UGC (User Generated Content) - ie first-hand perspective shared by a content creator. It is used for all Posts which do not contain the Article markup.

Structured data for the Author (Person or Organization) is also part of the markup.

Event

This markup makes it easier for people to discover and attend events, and contains details like event name, description, online or offline, address, etc. It is used for all Event Posts.

ProfilePage

This markup highlights information about each creator creator (either Person or Organization), such as their name or social handle, profile photo, bio, etc. It is used on Profile Pages.

Product / Merchant listing

This markup shows detailed information about a product (including price, seller, brand etc ) to search engines and may make the product appear in merchant listing experiences like shopping knowledge panel, popular product results, and product snippets.

Organization

This markup highlights the organization's administrative details, for example, logo, address, contact information, and business identifiers. It is used on Org Channels.

URL structure#

Destinations and content on each Network Site have meaningful structural URLs, that make it easy for human readability and meaningful for search engines to understand and cross reference versus other URLs on that site. All URLs are built using a set of rules, eg:

1. <Network site>/topics shows a list of topics while
2. <Network site>/topics/<topic name> shows an individual topic
3. <Network site>/@username shows all the posts authored by a particular member, while
4. <Network site>/@username/conversations shows all the posts authored by that member

Prerendering#

MainCross Network Sites are web apps (similar to mobile phone apps) - rather heavy, dynamic and deeply-interactive sites. In order to help search engines "see" a similar page that users do, we prerender all the pages on each Network Site in advance so that they can be served lightening fast when search engines come calling.

Link previews#

Great care is taken to produce high quality comprehensive rich cards when sharing on various platforms - social media, or messengers like whatsapp etc