Karl Bullock Karl Bullock @kbexit ← All posts

Two pull requests landed on the FriendsOfFlarum SEO extensio...

Two pull requests landed on the FriendsOfFlarum SEO extension within the last hour, and these are exactly the kind of features I can get behind.

The first one adds a toggle to de-index user profile pages. Profile pages are classic low-value pages for search — thin content, mostly duplicate links — and having them in the index does nothing for a forum but dilute it. The PR does it the right way too: noindex, follow, so crawlers still traverse the links without keeping the page itself in results.

The second one goes further: exclude entire tags from indexing. Pick the tags, and every discussion in them — plus the tag's own listing page — gets de-indexed. Selecting a parent tag covers its children too. That's exactly what you want for off-topic lounges, support dumps, or internal staff areas that have no business showing up in Google.

A lot of SEO tooling is busywork that chases scores instead of outcomes. These two are the opposite: simple controls over what search engines see, solving real problems forum admins actually have. More of this, please.