Question Making webtrees more SEO friendly?

Hi.

I am a long-time (15+ years) user of webtrees and PhpGedView, and I am extremely happy about it as a stand-alone tool for myself to keep track of my research. However, I also know from experience that most people begin their search for their distant relatives by Googling, and I have had been able to help (and get help from) several visitors who found my site via Google. However, webtrees does not seem to be particularly Google-friendly as compared to for instance Wikitree and Myheritage, which means that otherwise valuable information may not show up in Google searches at all. If webtrees is only used for personal research and does not want any visitors, that may be fine, but I am sure many of us have some rather interesting and valuable research on our webtrees sitess, and we also want to be found via the search engines. So my question (or suggestion) is, is there any work going on to try to make webtrees sites more Search Engine Friendly - doing SEO basically? Whether it is happening or not, I'd be happy to contribute to such a project. I know a thing or two about what makes Google happy, but I'll leave the coding to Greg

Best wishes,
Thomas

Have you turned on “site maps”, in the modules section?

Yes, I have enabled sitemaps, but sitemaps only tell Google where to look, not what or how to index it (or what rank to give it). Google, and other search engines, prefers pages with some degree of "natural language" rather than just a listing of facts such as the data is presented by webtrees. What I am suggesting is that webtrees is enabled to also show data in a more "natural language"-way, so as to make our sites more visible to those who search for our ancestors/relatives via Google.

Best wishes,
Thomas

a proverb wrote: The only thing constant, is change.

Especially with search engines, what gets you higher ranks today, might give a penalty tomorrow.

I would not change the complete page layout, requiring a thousand new translations, just for SEO.
And the natural language paragraphs are not suitable for editing. I'm just thinking up loud here.

So perhaps a tab in that format can be made. I recall JustCarmen had a module for v1 that presented a similar narrative for a proband, to be displayed on the Home page.

> What I am suggesting is that webtrees is enabled to also show data in a more "natural language"-way,

This is quite hard. A typical english sentence might be: "INDIVIDUAL was EVENT in/on DATE in/at PLACE"

But attempting to construct a sentence from parts will not work for other languages.

Word order changes, prepositions can be irregular, or replaced with inflexions.

I'd be interested in any suggestions, but I'm initially quite skeptical...

fisharebest wrote:

> What I am suggesting is that webtrees is enabled to also show data in a more "natural language"-way,

This is quite hard. A typical english sentence might be: "INDIVIDUAL was EVENT in/on DATE in/at PLACE"

From my point of view English or German could work. For most of slavic languages without a serious "automatic language support" it will not be "natural lanugage". The Ancestors report is in "natural laguage". In Slovak it looks unnatural - alternative would be to accept gramatical errors.

As an Example this simple sentence:

Slovak translation:
Natural language would be:

18. septembra 1890 sa oženil v Necpaloch s Máriou Peknou.

The point is - you have to find such sentences, that all names, locations events/facts are in nominative. It is not always possible and mostly it sounds very unnatural.

Perhaps a (custom) modul could add a new tab similar to Stories tab with text generated similar to the Ancestors report.

Ladislav

Following up on this discussion from two months ago, I acknowledge that it may be difficult to create a natural language engine that could show the basic data in multiple natural languages.

So I was thinking, that from an SEO point of view, another improvement might be to show the "Notes" tab - which I guess is what comes closest to being used for writing actual biographies - upon loading "Individuals" pages, possibly below the basic facts & events. Google generally doesn't give much weight to "hidden" content that is not shown per default, so showing Notes upfront might make for a serious SEO improvement for sites using that field. Possibly it could be implemented as an option (ie. show it upfront or as a tab).

Best wishes,
Thomas

You cann disable the module Notes in control panel. The notes will be now displayed on the bottom of facts&events.

Thanks. That's basically exactly what I asked for - I would've assumed that disabling the module would hide notes altogether.

Best wishes,
Thomas

Great to hear from a long-time web trees user like yourself! I agree with you on the importance of making web tree sites more SEO-friendly. After all, who wouldn't want their valuable research to be discovered by more people, right? Now, when it comes to SEO, there are a lot of factors that come into play, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, backlinks, and more. But fear not, there are tools out there that can help simplify the process. I advise you to take a look at Crowdo SEO Competitor Analysis . It's a nifty tool that can give you a detailed report on your competitor's SEO strategies, including their top-performing keywords, backlinks, and more.

fisharebest wrote:

> What I am suggesting is that webtrees is enabled to also show data in a more "natural language"-way,

This is quite hard. A typical english sentence might be: "INDIVIDUAL was EVENT in/on DATE in/at PLACE"

But attempting to construct a sentence from parts will not work for other languages.

Word order changes, prepositions can be irregular, or replaced with inflexions.

I'd be interested in any suggestions, but I'm initially quite skeptical...

unigen.us/tree/HHH/individual/P823/Pierr...-_jc-fancy-treeview_ is an example of Carmen's Descendants and Ancestors tab. The language is fine in English, Spanish, and Dutch. For languages that have declensions and gender changes in names, it may not be quite as good, but I don't think would prevent getting attention from distant relatives via web search.  To put it another way, if the language is "unnatural" as role mentioned, that would not deter someone who is more interested in information than in pleasant prose.

I'm not holding my breath for results, though. I have relatives interested in genealogy, but even though they have seen a screen shot of "on this day" every day for more than a year on Facebook, as far as I can tell, none of them have looked at the site. (A few of those posts included an explanation of how to get more info on the site and all included the URI.) ONE cousin requested an account, but never verified. Data just cannot compete with eye candy these days.

That module from JustCarmen is great indeed. It puts the data in the exact structure genealogists had used before there was GEDCOM.

One wonders what ChatGPT makes of that, back to GEDCOM format (see other thread)

bertkoor wrote:

That module from JustCarmen is great indeed. It puts the data in the exact structure genealogists had used before there was GEDCOM

Almost. the numbering system is a little different. But it has forward links, to compensate.

Hey there! It's awesome to see you're working on making webtrees more SEO-friendly. The numbering system might be a bit different, but it's great to know that there are forward links to help compensate for it. Keep up the good work, and remember, genuine user engagement beats any traffic bot any day!