One of the huge benefits for public Q&A platforms is the consistent growth of organic search traffic that we’re able to bring to our customer’s sites.  We’ve seen year over year of organic growth from our clients which we documented in our post about How User-Generated Q&A Grows Traffic and Conversions on Your Site.  While the performance the Answerbase platform achieves with our default settings is great, we’ve launched some features that give you even more control over how your content gets indexed or even if specific content gets indexed.

We’ve been supporting the ability for you to manage your Robots.txt file within your settings, and now we’re expanding the capabilities you have to include control over the URL of each piece of content, page titles, meta data, whether a page gets indexed or not, and whether to include a page in your sitemap.  Here are some notes about where to find these changes:

Questions Pages

As you view each question in your administration interface, you’ll see a “Settings” tab where you now have control over the following:

• Customizing the question URL
• Editing the Title tag value
• Editing the Description meta tag value
• Editing the Keywords meta tag value
• Editing the Robots meta tag to be index/noindex and follow/nofollow
• Whether or not to include that question in the system sitemap

Categories Pages

As you view your categories in your administration interface, you can click on and individual category where you’ll see some new settings options where you now have control how the system manages the pages displayed through browsing categories on your Q&A platform.  The following options are available:

• Customizing the category URL
• Editing the Title tag value
• Editing the Description meta tag value
• Editing the Keywords meta tag value
• Editing the Robots meta tag to be index/noindex and follow/nofollow
• Whether or not to include that category browsing page in the system sitemap

These new features give you even more control over how your Q&A platform is indexed and gives you the ability to make adjustments for enhanced SEO benefits.  We hope you like that new feature and let us know if there is anything you’d like to see on Answerbase by sending us a note on our Contact Us form.