phpBB Ideas • Re: Add open graph meta data to improve sharing of content

I'm giving my upvote for this OG image metadata adding feature too, which is included in the 'maintained, but no further features to be added' SEO Metadata extension linked above and Magic OGP.

And maybe this stuff is already included in the beta versions of PHPBB, but if not or either way, it has my vote.

Magic OGP creates within the forum, what I call live links, those Facebook/X image and text included boxes, sometimes dynamic image included link boxes that substitute for a post's otherwise boring text-only non-descriptive URL. It doesn't prevent users from creating boring URLs, where appropriate. It just makes it easier for non-technical users to simply paste a URL to a post and voila!. If the URL is pointed internally, it'll associate a fixed default forum branded image if it cannot locate one within a topic or will insert one dynamically from the topic itself, with the help of metadata already recorded for the internal URL by SEO Metadata. Topic title is automatically included too. It's cool stuff!!

For guest/troll/AI BOTs, access is restricted to our site's 'rich content' knowledgebase. Given AI data harvesting, I think every PHP site should consider doing this, if their site's data has value. Thus, while limited in its capabilities to correctly identify inline attached images when guest access is restricted,* SEO Metadata is still very capable. It's like crack cocaine for image search BOTs and a huge boost to our forum's SEO page result ranking.

This from our Google Search Console. I've never seen any other site alteration that has affected our site more positively than this one...

If I had to guess, I think this probably has to do with how the extension turns our tiny obscure forum's ordinary threads into rich content threads. Google is pulling images from the threads and thumbnailing them into forum Google search results and Google Web search results...

Last week I had already noticed that the number of crawl requests was moving in a positive direction, but this is abnormal and very exciting! It just continues to skyrocket!


I've seen our indxed pages' numbers hovering around 4,000 indexed pages for years. I couldn't understand why Google wasn't penetrating deeper than about threads no older than 2 years. Then today, forum crawls just jumped to 5,150 due to enabling this extension, a 32.3% increase in the last week.

...

* Guests are unable to view attached images due to permissions restrictions we've set. As a security measure, guest forum access is restricted due to excessive data harvesting and the DOS threat of having image URLs publicly available for bandwidth draining file download BOTs.

Statistics: Posted by SQLnovice — Mon Jan 22, 2024 1:14 am

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