Current Situation 

Member Directory content will not always be indexed by search engines even if the pages are publicly visible.

Desired Situation  

Have all publicly visible pages (including member directories) be fully exposed and visible to search engines to improve site SEO ranking potential.

 

 

 

 

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Frank | User Experience Designer
Wild Apricot

Our members would greatly appreciate this.  We're a small, rural community and for many of our users the Wild Apricot profile page is the only web presence so it's important all member profiles can be optimized for search engines (SEO).  In addition, having an XML sitemap would also greatly improve crawler access to member profiles.

I agree this is a very valuable idea....and something that we have been asked for from our membership.

If this is not available to us through Wild Apricot is there a workaround so that members in the directory are found through a google search? 

Meagan

 

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any... Member directly is shown using JS code and this is not properly handled by search engines. 

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Evgeny
Product Design Team

There is also thread on custom URLs of member profile - http://community.wildapricot.com/23163/ShowThread.aspx - but the thread main focus is also mainly about optimizing member directory for search engines. 

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Evgeny
Product Design Team

Apricot's Kernel:

Member directly is shown using JS code and this is not properly handled by search engines. 

I'm inclined to think this is not so much a flaw in search engine indexing, as you imply, but of the membership directory design. Some effort was put into making static pages search engine friendly, but the member directory, which is probably the most important part of the system, was left out of that mix. I hope you are giving this problem some priority.

kchayka:

Apricot's Kernel:

Member directly is shown using JS code and this is not properly handled by search engines. 

I'm inclined to think this is not so much a flaw in search engine indexing, as you imply, but of the membership directory design. Some effort was put into making static pages search engine friendly, but the member directory, which is probably the most important part of the system, was left out of that mix. I hope you are giving this problem some priority.

I agree and would like to see this given a high priority as our members joins us for the eduction we offer and the advocacy we provide on behalf of an industry. If our members could be found through us it would add SO much value to membership!

Sure - it's not a flaw in search engine indexing, just our design mistake. We have this in our list with quite a high priority but I cannot promise any specific date. 

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Evgeny
Product Design Team

Another 6 months has gone by without any progress on this subject.

As a Chamber of Commerce this is very important to us and our members and I'm sure to any other of your clients that have businesses as members.

Are there any plans to get this on the roadmap? Do you have any idea how much work is involved and therefore what the likelyhood is of us ever seeing this corrected?

Regards,
Ian
worthing and adur chamber of commerce
www.worthingandadurchamber.co.uk
 

Ian, this is on our roadmap - but I currently see the priority of this as relatively low, given two things:

1) Few comments on this thread 

2) As I understand, the idea is that your members will get a bit of SEO benefit by having a link from your site. It seems to me that this benefit would be imperceptibly small in most cases, given that it's just one link and that your own site is not a very high ranking site in Google.

 

 

One other factor is that we need to wait for version 5.0 (~late summer 2012) which will have new CMS and new architecture for displaying all functional pages, only then it would make sense to consider changes to member directory. 

 

I would appreciate feedback. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Dmitry,
Thanks for your response.
I imagine that the vast majority of your clients are like me – we only look at the wishlist and other areas of the forums when we have a problem and I’m sure that most of them don’t know they have a problem! I assumed that our web site was “Google-friendly” not that the greater part of it is completely unsearchable as far as Google is concerned.

I imagine that if you sent out an email to all your business-oriented clients asking “Do you care whether Google can search and rank ALL of your site?”, the overwhelming response would be “of course we do!! Fix it!!”
If you don’t agree, I would encourage you to contact your business-oriented clients and ask them .

You note that our site is not highly ranked by Google – only 3/10 when I last checked – and that’s not surprising when 300 or more of our pages are hidden from the search tools is it?

I understand and agree that it makes sense to delay any changes until your new CMS system and architecture is in place but would urge you to schedule this change as soon as possible after that date and give us a commitment that problem will be rectified in 2012.


Regards,
Ian
Worthing and adur chamber of commerce
www.worthingandadurchamber.co.uk

Ian, 

Yes, that's the plan - to address this soon after releasing the new CMS.

FYI, I highly doubt that indexing your member pages would affect *your site* Google ranking in any way. It *might* give *your member sites* a *tiny* boost - but unless they have great keyword reach descriptions in their profiles, closely related to your other site content, this would not affect your site ranking. In fact, it might have slight negative effect if it adds lots of outbound links (I assume that each member has a link to their own site on their profile page). SEO is a very complex area. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot