Bounty: 50
I’m running an SaaS application example.com, which in addition to its landing pages has several pages of "first party" content, for example:
example.com/featuresexample.com/pricingexample.com/support
Once a customer signs up, the design of the application is that they get to name & use a subpath, where they manage custom content. For example:
example.com/joes-placeexample.com/bobs-place
For a real world example of this pattern, look at GitHub: You sign up and then get github.com/:username.
Challenge: I’m looking for best practices to clearly distinguish first party content (like /pricing) from third-party content (like /joes-place), when it comes to search and SEO. Specifically:
- Google has occasionally decided to auto-onebox customers like
/joes-place; I’d like it to not do that. - I want search engines to keep crawling third-party content, since it’s important to the customers that they show up in search.
- For vanity/aesthetic reasons, I cannot move third party content to its own domain (e.g. I want to keep doing what github does).
So far what I’ve done:
- First party & customer content use different Google Analytics accounts
- First party content is in
sitemap.xml, customer content isn’t mentioned at all.
Are there other best practices I should be following here?