SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means that in addition to the content on your pages being visible to search engines (search engine compatibility), it appears as high as possible in the results pages.

It may seem weird, but for the best results with search engine visibility, Muut generates a static pre-formatted page, which, to search engines, is the only page on the web that includes discussion content. These pages are updated hourly, and specifically designed with SEO in mind. Your search results will appear like so:

When you click a Muut search result from Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. you’ll see something like this:

That’s a static, read-only page specifically designed for search engines. They will rank the content high because:

  • The HTML is specifically formatted for search engines using simple syntax and microformats.
  • This is a simple, low tech solution with no tricks – just the raw content.
  • The content is updated hourly
  • There is no duplicate content; the discussion on the static dump is not present on any other page as far as search engines are concerned.

Directing users to your site

The static content has a prominent “Open full view…“ button on top/right. It’s pushes users to the actual forums on your site. The button stays in place even when the page is scrolled down. Community owners who primarily embed their forum will want to change their forum URL to make sure users are forwarded to the correct page, rather than the default hosted page on muut.com. You can change your forum URL on your settings page: here.

The URL is a full path to your forums. When you copy paste that URL into your browser the forums should be opened. There is also an input for Google Analytics tracking code which is used by the static index. The changes are updated on the index pages within the hour. This input also enables analytics on the forum and commenting instances.

Custom domain configuration

  By default, static SEO pages reside on Muut’s servers. This can be changed to, instead, reside on your own server. First you need to change the URL on the Muut placeholder tag. Change from this:

<!-- Static content on Muut servers -->
<a class="muut" href="https://muut.com/i/your_forumname">
  Acme forums
</a>

to this:

<!-- Static content on your servers -->
<a class="muut" href="/i/your_forumname">
  Acme forums
</a>

Next you need to configure your webserver to serve this content from muut.com.

Keep a close eye on the code difference between default and S3 bucket forwarding. If you plan on using a Custom S3 Bucket, you simply have to replace http://muut.com/i with your S3 bucket’s public URL. These are notated/commented in the code below.

NGINX config
server {
  listen 80;
  server_name domain.com;
  # Muut configuration (this location block only)
  location ~* ^/i/ {
    proxy_pass https://muut.com;
    # OR your S3 bucket URL
  }
  location ~* ^/m/ {
    proxy_pass https://muut.com;
  }
}
Apache virtual host config
# Load these modules if not currently loaded
LoadModule proxy_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule ssl_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_ssl.so

<VirtualHost *:80>
  # Add this to your VirtualHost
  SSLProxyEngine On
  ProxyPass /i https://muut.com/i
  ProxyPassReverse /i https://muut.com/i
  # OR your S3 bucket URL (no /i on the end)
  ProxyPass /m https://muut.com/m
  ProxyPassReverse /m https://muut.com/m
</VirtualHost>
Apache .htaccess config
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /
  RewriteRule ^i/(your-community-name)(/.*)?$ http://muut.com/i/$1$2 [P]
  # OR your S3 bucket URL (no /i in the middle)
  RewriteRule ^m/(.*)$ http://muut.com/m/$1 [P]
</IfModule>
IIS 7 Web server web.config
<rewrite>
  <rules>
    <rule name="Muut Index Rewrite" stopProcessing="true">
      <match url="^i/(.*)" />
      <action type="Rewrite" url="https://muut.com/i/{R:1}" />
    </rule>
    <rule name="Muut Media Rewrite" stopProcessing="true">
      <match url="^m/(.*)" />
      <action type="Rewrite" url="https://muut.com/m/{R:1}" />
    </rule>  
  </rules>
</rewrite>

The /m path is used for loading styles and scripts so you can customize with CSS. These /m proxy rules must remain pointing to https://muut.com/m. If you have a working configuration for a different web server such as IIS or Lighttpd, please be kind and send it to info@muut.com. Thank you!