link[@rel='me'] tag support

[colindean]

Would it be appropriate for this plugin to support the link[@rel='me'] URL validation/verification ~standard that Mastodon and others are supporting to claim and verify an association between a profile and another URL?

I've implemented this in a Jekyll site but looking through our code, I wonder if that facility should be handled through this plugin. My current implementation is abstract, allowing the consumer to set link_rel_me_urls as a list of URL strings in _config.yml and it just emits those inside the appropriate tag inside the header.

I'm happy to put up a PR for this if it's the right plugin for that.

[Coedice]

I think this would be a useful addition. I would certainly use it for one.

[ashmaroli]

Hi, this ticket came to my notice just now.

From what I understand, rel="me" attribution is used for establishing equivalence between two user-profiles. i.e. John Doe would use this attribution to interlink their profile at URL https://smp-1.com/users/john.doe and https://smp-2.org/u/johndoe789/ to indicate that the two profiles are of theirs. They may also use to interlink between two profiles on same platform e.g. https://smp-1.com/users/john.doe and https://smp-1.com/users/jdoe123.

In light of above, I fail to understand how rel="me" has relevance in meta tags for SEO. How is the plugin going to determine if current page (being indexed by crawler) is a legitimate equivalent of given user-profile. At that point what is the priority of <link rel="me" ... /> on a page metadata over <a rel="me" ...</a> embedded in page content at anchor origin / destination (page being indexed)?

[Coedice]

I suppose that <link rel="me" ... /> could be used as a social signal to search engines, since if you have a verified Mastodon account that has many followers, that would indicate that the website is likely to be a relevant result. Possibly, this could also boost the ranking of the Mastodon account, if the search engine has a high confidence of relevance of your website.

I have no idea if these things are actually happening, but these are some ways this kind of tag could have an SEO impact.

[ashmaroli]

@Coedice, I understand SEO boost for an About Me page linked to a verified popular Mastodon profile but what is the relevance of this metadata on a page (in the same website) that is focused on something (not even remotely connected to the Mastodon profile), say, a post glorifying a family recipe handed down by the author's grandmother..? 😄

[Coedice]

The <link rel="me" ... /> reflects the authorship/control of the two sources, so if they wrote an article about a family recipe, that is related to their Mastodon account by the fact that it is under their authorship/control.

A single website might link to different Mastodon accounts depending on the page, for example https://mashable.com/author/aperry and https://mashable.com/author/stan-schroeder. They might want to even have their Mastodon accounts <link rel="me" ... />ed to from each of the articles they wrote. It would be great to be able to do this with the same author front matter object as is done for Twitter.

(Also, I'm assuming that's an article you wrote, where can I find it? Haha)

[ashmaroli]

The <link rel="me" ... /> reflects the authorship/control of the two sources..

I cannot find any reference supporting this statement, on the internet. Either ways, this is not paramount to this plugin. I recommend adding the markup at the template level.

[benbalter]

Landed here via search hoping the plugin would "automatically" add the link rel=me tags for mastadon verification, similar to how we support specifying social media profiles within the JSON-LD. Adding the additional source links here in case the discussion is revived at a later date.

I recommend adding the markup at the template level.

:+1:. Easy enough to do.