For years now, everyone has been complaining about Google seeming to hate us and not indexing Hive posts. We have so much content here, surely we should show up in search results more?
Turns out, the issue is our frontends. After a talk in the witness townhall today about SEO for hive.io, I casually checked the 3 big frontends for sitemap.xml files. The result flabbergasted me. Error 404 on hive.blog and ecency, and an interrupted connection on peakd. I don't want to dunk on the operators of those platforms, but come on guys, that's web development 101... We do have canonical links to avoid being penalized for duplicate content, but then we don't give search engines the option to index the content in the first place.
So now I have a new marketing angle for hivecomb.net. Because it uses cutting edge technology, including the sitemap.xml! With the canonical links, these sitemaps can only contain posts that were written on that respective interface. Until other interfaces finally catch up to 2005 standards, if you want your post to be discoverable on search engines, post it on hivecomb!
//edit: turns out, it's not that simple and other issues are in play too. I'll leave this post as is just to promote the site, and will keep trying to improve indexing for posts from it, but it's a lot more complicated. We're forming a working group with all interface operators to do a coordinated push for platform wide SEO.
