Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

[LukasKalbertodt]

There was some related work in #559 but there is more we can do. From reading through some docs, here are some more ideas (not a complete list):

• description meta tag: it's unclear how Tobira could generate that. For video pages the video description can be used. For realm pages... the first text block? I don't know. Maybe we rather don't and let Google figure out the best snippet? (Docs)
• Provide a sitemap? I'm not sure yet what exactly this is for. Apparently for more quickly telling Google about new and removed pages?
• Use data-nosnippet to remove some parts of the page from being used as a snippet (only works with span, div and section unfortunately). Might be useful to remove the footer for example (but there is no appropriate div we could use...).
• Improve the <title>. I'm not sure how we could best do that, but one idea: add a new config general.title_suffix. Then people have the option to provide something shorter than the general.page_title. For example the page title of Uni Bern's tobira is "Video Portal University of Bern (Tobira)". That's quite long! As a title for the home page that's fine. But having that as suffix in "Banks & Financial Crises Explained • Video Portal University of Bern (Tobira)" ... that's quite long. With another config string one could make the suffix "Bern Video Portal" or sth like that. :shrug:

[LukasKalbertodt]

From here:

(from a discussion we had a couple of months ago): ETH received reports from Google about Opencast videos embedded in their website being not properly indexed. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9495631?utm_source=wnc_20211735&utm_medium=gamma&utm_campaign=wnc_20211735&utm_content=msg_110558249&hl=en describes how to optimize video publication to increase visibility for those videos. Maybe contrary to the "noindex" header of this ticket, but anyway...

[oas777]

PS: Part of the Google report mentioned above is a gem for open source afficionados: "The following reasons prevent a video from being indexed: ... The video is in an unsupported encoding, based on the file extension of the video file's URL. ... Good examples:

https://example.com/videos/video1.mp4 https://example.com/videos/video1.mpeg

Bad example: https://example.com/videos/video1.ogg"

[LukasKalbertodt]

I just tried looking at results from two different public instances of Tobira:

• https://www.google.com/search?q=site:av-portal.uibk.ac.at
• https://www.google.com/search?q=site:video.tuwien.ac.at

And it seems like none of the results are shown as "video results", although some of them should. There are several results pointing to video pages, that dont have a preview image in Google. We should look into that.