BuddyPress.org

@baldarab – I just took a quick look at your site – where are your “Groups” ? I don’t see any links to what I know of as groups. Do you have to register and login to get a navigation to the groups?

@baldarab –

I see how you are using groups – so it does appear that links to them are easily discoverable from your public facing pages.

If you do a view source and look at your code for each of your groups, you will notice that the page title is exactly the same for all of your groups ( <title>Activities – Freaky Rivet</title> ) – and there is no meta name description =

Two major issues for the big G.

Which version of buddypress are you using?

This problem concerns me so much that I have kept one of my sites with an older version of buddypress (2.2.3.1 ) with the cobbled custom code I was able to get from wpmudev ( http://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/bp-meta-tite-description-for-groups-and-members-pages#post-806736 ) – the cobbled code may work the newer version of bp – but things are quite confusing with how wp has changed up some of the title thing, and bp has it’s way of things and there are possible conflicts with priority or something..

The discussion on this trac ticket( https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6107 ) says things have been “fixed” – I do appreciate the devs working on it a bit – but I have a feeling the fix is more of a “make it work in a semi-okay way with a couple of setups” – not much as far as giving users real control over the titles and descriptions.

I am guessing people will point to theme designers to hook this up, and they will point to “we use wordpress’s suggested way of title-ing (wp the title or whatever) – and so it’s wp/bp issue, and descriptions should be handled my an seo plugin – but given that bp’s pages are pseudo pages without any taxonomy registered, it appears that yoast and others have so desire to work with it.

This is my current understanding, and may be not 100% accurate – what I gather after posting many questions and issues relating to this in various places.

I’d pay someone to code a plugin that gives options for bp meta stuff like the suggestion I posted before, and give it to the community. If I could understand all the bp/wp code and php I’d gladly make it. It seems the BP coders are spread a bit thin, so I have no good options for fixing this issue at the moment.

@baldarab – if you were to create duplicate content in order for it to get indexed, I would add a robots.txt that tells google and others to not crawl / index your pages. It’s bad to have pages with duplicate titles and no meta description- as is the issue with how groups are currently handled in your case and many others… however, having a second page on the site with the exact same content in order to get it indexed may cause the dreaded duplicate content penalty, and perhaps the “thin content” – lower ranking factoring.

Certainly it would be best to get the title and meta descriptions fixed with bp groups (and member pages) as the best solution, but seeing how you are currently using the groups as basically a page with an activity, votes, comments, and related ones.. with a “sign up to add your own” option, – I wonder if it would be best to just delete those “groups”…

Instead I would consider making them just a new “page” of the site.. or if you really want to get into the whole “different users sharing different projects” – kind of instructables kind of thing – with a twist, it may be better to turn on WP multi-site – and make each activity a new “site (blog)”

– doing so would give you the same features – a video, instructions, related activities (posts and sites) – ability to sign up and create your own, comments, etc…

and that would give you the standard WP search indexing options – good page titles, descriptions, etc (not the errors that bP is currently producing for those pages)

just a thought – not exactly sure how you are using the groups thing and what the goal is with it, just glancing at the setup and thinking what I may do…

@baldarab – well you can add some more original text to each of the “groups” and get some “Above the fold” – that may help a bit,
some other problems..

your sitemaps (http://www.freakyrivet.com/sitemap_index.xml ) (created by yoast) – are not showing any of your “activities / groups” – however if you create a sitemap with a tool like: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/download/freakyrivet.15149203/sitemap.html?view=1

It does show your groups pages in the sitemap created by an actual spider – so add this to another fail with BP and yoast not playing well. I am guessing same for members page since those are “pseudo pages”.

Looking at how another sitemap maker sees your pages, it obvious that you should add some code to get original page titles and meta descriptions. You have about 70 or so pages with the same page title and description.

I just tested that code from wpmudev that I posted above with a newer BP install / updated version and it is working for me. SO you could give that a go – although you will likely have to edit the code and change the name of the profile fields to match your site profile fields (for the code to pull and create info on the member’s pages)

So – your pages are a bit thin on original content, especially above the fold, you have no or duplicate page titles and meta descriptions – and your site is instructing google and others that those pages are not important as they are not in your published sitemap.

I would tell yoast to not make your sitemap and just upload your own.

I would also – not sure why your yoast settings are having it makes mpas for categories and tags – I normally put settings to noindex nofollow all tags and category pages and author pages.. well that’s a lot of free advice – anyhow – hope that info makes sense / helps..