Leo Finance & Hive Marketing: Search Tools & Google's SEO Indexing Need Help!

Have you ever noticed that it can be a challenge to find even your own older posts on Hive powered sites, including Peakd, Leofinance and most others? I highlighted this same problem back in 2016 on Steem and somehow it still persists. Even worse, if I search in Google for my own posts they almost never show up - but my old posts DO consistently show up for Steem powered sites.. This needs fixing!

Hive (and most hive powered sites) are repositories of information primarily, they store text and multimedia that contain a wealth of knowledge, thoughts and experiences from the human world. We have gone to great lengths to create clever ways to make sure that our information is uncensored and not lost - yet it IS being lost, not through censorship but through poor discovery and search tools!

There are several problems here - search tools on hive sites are typically not very effective (LeoFinance doesn't even seem to have a search tool at present), native post discovery is not well evolved on the blockchain level, there are a huge number of posts to search through and finally, frustratingly, search engines like Google tend to incorrectly index Hive sites (or don't index them at all).

Improving post discovery will require a multi dimensional approach and it will be interesting to see how the major marketing company 'Ingite' that are currently being paid from the Hive proposal system address these issues. As we can see from the recent update from @lordbutterly, they definitely already have their hands full with other issues.

Google Indexing

Having run my own social network for many years before Hive and Steem existed, I am well aware that Google will blacklist such sites that share 'controversial' information. Google already lost a Billion Euro court case for exactly this behaviour, but sadly I wasn't aware of it at the time so didn't participate as a claimant.

I mention this because if you search in Google for, for example, my 'whistleblower series' using the prefix of 'site:peakd.com' to restrict the search only to Hive via PeakD, you will currently only see one post come back in the search results that is from that series. However, if you do the same for steemit.com, you will see most of my posts (before I left steem) from that series, correctly indexed. CLEARLY, Google is favouring Steem over Hive - not just in terms of ranking but in terms of actual inclusion of pages in results. Why is that?

Determining the internal workings of Google's algorithm is not easy at all, but in this case we know that hive and steem are very similar, so such a huge difference in the way they are treated is extremely suspicious to me. Could it be that Steem was taken over by Chinese interests to stifle free speech and Google is just playing their part by enabling Steem and stifling Hive? I can't say for sure, but it's something to think about given the documents leaked from Google which openly state they intend to censor the internet because we can't be 'trusted' with fredom!

Taking Action

While decyphering Google's activity might be extremely difficult and finding remedy outside of court cases might be impossible - we can still take action to help hive powered sites and users to not get lost down the internet memory hole.

1. All Hive powered sites need to make internal search functionality a high priority. Fixing issues and being imaginative in the process. So many sites have great search tools, a bit of research goes a long way.

2. SEO audits need to be regularly performed on Hive powered sites regularly to make sure that page desgins and overall site structure aren't resulting in the sites being penalised by google and other search engines. Each Dapp creator can do this but it would be very powerful to have a team or group tasked with monitoring this and advising Dapp teams directly. Building Dapps is quite a different skill to keeping up with SEO requirements, which is why there are SEO specialists working full time on getting websites to perform in search engines. I did point out in my reply to @lordbutterfly that @crucialweb will be happy to help out in this.

3. When creating posts we can take SEO into consideration. Don't use headlines that are too long and use any feature in the DApp editor you use that enable editing of the blog post's URL. URLs, titles and internal post headers should ideally contain keywords and phrases that the world is interested in. This will grab search engine attention.

Let's get Hive where it deserves to be!


Wishing you well,
Ura Soul

Read My User Guide for Hive Here