Search engine optimization
Learn how community sites are optimized for search engine discovery
Sitemap generation
We automatically generate an XML sitemap for your community site. This helps search engine crawlers discover and index all of the content and pages on your Hall community site.
It tells search engines like Google when a page was last modified (<lastmod>) and how frequently it should check back for updates (<changefreq>). You can see the typical shape of a sitemap below:
Your site’s sitemap can be accessed from the /sitemap.xml path. For example, it can be viewed by navigating to example.hall.community/sitemap.xml and replacing that URL with your site’s domain.
You can learn more about sitemap’s in Google’s documentation.
Submitting sitemap to Google
When Google’s search crawler next visits your Hall site, it will automatically fetch your sitemap from your robots.txt.
You can also manually submit your sitemap to Google through the Google Search Console.
After adding your community site as a new property in Google Search Console, you can submit your sitemap by navigating to the Sitemaps report page in Search Console.
Simply copy your sitemap’s URL (eg. example.hall.community/sitemap.xml) and then click Add.
This will enable you to see when your sitemap was last read by Google, how many pages have been discovered, and if there are any errors with your sitemap.
Robots.txt file
A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on a website. It also helps search engines to discover the sitemap for a website. This file is automatically generated for every Hall community site.
Your site’s file can be accessed from the /robots.txt path. For example, it can be viewed by navigating to example.hall.community/robots.txt and replacing that URL with your site’s domain.
Structured data
Every Hall community site automatically supports special structured data formats that enables Google to display pages as enriched search results.
Specifically, Hall currently supports the discussion forum post, Q&A page, and sitelinks search box structured data schemas documented by Google.
Discussion forums
Discussion forum structured data (DiscussionForumPosting) is designed to help search engines discover conversations from any forum-style site where people collectively share first-hand perspectives.
Google uses this data to identify online discussions across the web and highlight rich snippets and in search results such as Discussions and Forums.
In Hall, any posts and their comments and replies are automatically marked up in with the Discussion forum structured data schema to help Google identify perspectives from real people in their search results.
You can read more about Discussion forums in Google’s documentation.
Q&A pages
Q&A page structured data (QAPage) are web pages that contain data in a question and answer format, which is one question followed by its answers.
Pages with the Q&A structured data are eligible to have a rich result displayed on the search results page. This rich treatment helps your site reach the right users in search results.
For example, you might see a rich result for the user query “How do I change my password?” if the page has been marked up with answers to that question.
In addition to enabling your content for the rich result treatment, marking up your Q&A page helps Google generate a better snippet for your page.
You can read more about Q&A pages in Google’s documentation.
Sitelinks search box
The sitelinks search box structured data enables people to perform a search on your community site directly from Google search results.
You can read more about Q&A pages in Google’s documentation.
Using Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that helps you measure search traffic and improve performance in search results.
You can sign up and add your community site in Search Console to see the impact of Hall’s SEO features and better understand how your site is performing in search results.
To get started with Google Search Console, you can sign up on for free.
If you already have an existing account in Search Console, you can add a new property for your community site.
Add your site as a property
Once you’ve signed up, you will need to add your community site as a property. You should follow the steps from Google’s documentation.
This typically requires you to verify ownership of your domain name via DNS records.