SteemIT Technical SEO Audit

Since its first reward payout on the 4th of July, SteemIT has taken the crypto community by storm and is slowly trickling out to the mainstream with users referring friends and family.

While the community is actively posting, commenting and voting while also getting a piece of the pie in rewards, we have to take a step back and think.

How can we maximize one of the best blockchain use cases and scale up with the current user base and amount of posts?

That's where people in the growth hacking and marketing field, like myself fit in.

TL'DR : Im going to provide a few key pointers from the technical search engine audit I have conducted on the SteemIT.com website to grow more traffic from Google , Yahoo and the likes. This is usually a one-off website optimization, following "best practices" with minor tweaks if any other problems are spotted in the future.

Indexed Pages

Using site:steemit.com in Google we see about 208,000 results. While it's good to see that many pages indexed (Google crawling the site fairly well) we do need to no-index a few pages (like author pages, password,login etc) which I will go into detail in another blog post.

Meta Data

While Google does automatically append titles if you search for a url on SteemIT, using a tool like Seocentro indicates that we don't have a Title Tag (H1) and description. These 2 elements are the most important in indicating what a page is about and can easily be implemented h1 tags and pulling the first sentences for the description. Rather than having crawl bot "figure it out" it would be a best practise to provide this information off the bat. Other search engines aren't as advanced as Google's algorithms and we might be losing search visibility.

Duplicate Content

There are two types of duplicate content, one being content that can be found elsewhere and content that is duplicated twice on the site. Gladly we have Cheetah bot, but we may have to actively no-index pages that are duplicated from spammers.

Robot.txt

The robots.txt file that can be found here for crawler bots.

The current Robots.txt

User-agent: *

Allow: /

My suggestion:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /specificfolder/

# Sitemaps

Sitemap: https://www.steemit.com/sitemap.xml

Using disallow signals bots from searching in specific pages (if applicable)

The sitemap function tells them here are the pages of this site I would like you to see.

Sitemap

While this might be an error on my part I can't seem to locate any sitemaps. While not that big of a problem (for the time being) as we can see posts being indexed with site:steemit.com as mentioned above, it would be preferable to have one and submitting them in webmastertools of each individual search engine. In my opinion one of the main reasons the site is being crawled is due to using Google site search (currently offline) internally on Steem.

Infinite Scroll vs Pagination

This is an endless battle of UX designers vs SEOs. While as a user I personally prefer infinite scroll, pagination is usually a better practice and easier to setup.

Indexation is hard with infinite scroll unless a very advanced method is used. SteemIT is using a traditional method that Google clearly states "With traditional infinite scroll, individual items displayed after the initial page load aren’t discoverable to crawlers."

Due to not having read access to Google Analytics and Google Webmastertools I will be cutting this somewhat short but these are some of the "easier" fixes to gain more search traffic.

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primus (59) 10 years ago

Very interesting analysis, thank you for your work!

As for navigation - absolutely agree it is a hard choice between infinite scroll and pagination. But while designing steeme.ru (it's a first local russian community site, totally based on STEEM blockchain, announced here) we do prefer pagination instead of infinite scroll.

I will share the steeme.ru Google Analytics and Google Webmastertools' data soon.

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