Indexation technique
Indexation is the much less glamorous however all too vital facet of user-generated content material. Whereas UGC is usually a catapult in scaling search engine optimization, it’s a matter of surfacing the person submissions that finest help your objectives. Some could also be spammy, low-quality, and even damaging to your model.
High quality is the crux of indexation
Further tech search engine optimization considerations are at play when figuring out what content material Google ought to crawl and index. One of the crucial widespread and detrimental points is skinny content material, which dilutes your search engine optimization over time. Exhausting your crawl funds can even grow to be an issue at a sure scale, which occurs shortly as UGC positive aspects traction.
To constantly obtain the specified high quality stage, audit your UGC types and optimize fields to gather the content material you need to index. For instance, you may embrace required fields, ask the fitting questions, and implement character-count minimums to make sure customers present satisfactory data.
It’s a fragile steadiness to find out necessities to maximise the standard AND price of person submissions. For instance, you don’t need to require many fields that discourage customers from submitting. It’s value contemplating robotically deindexing content material that doesn’t meet your required minimums, versus not permitting customers to add it within the first place.
Construct automation into your indexation technique
Enhancing the system you employ to supply content material can create a extra strong pool of UGC high quality. Since low-quality UGC can slip via the cracks, constructing automation into your indexation technique is crucial.
The meta robots directive is likely one of the most significant instruments at your disposal, which tells Google whether or not to index a web page through an “index” or “noindex” tag. One potential method to keep away from skinny content material points is robotically setting the meta robots tag on new UGC pages. You may base this on high quality management elements just like the variety of fields the person crammed out, the character depend of particular essential fields, or related situations.