It would be a great idea to enable it for all posts.
This forum has enough high quality scholarly content to qualify as an academic resource of note.
There will not be any issue with the Google algorithm at all. In fact Google actively encourages using these metadata for websites with content like EA forum has. The algorithm will be able to decide what is relevant to it and will simply ignore the rest.
With respect to the names, that also would not be a problem. The only consequence is that Google will store and display search results using the names they used. So if anyone likes to have their article to be associated with their real name they will need to use the real name in their post.
There will not be any other impact.
Also: Just in case someone prefers not to have their forum post indexed by Google scholar, there are ways to remove indexed entries . But I have a feeling hardly anyone would opt for that.
The algorithm will be able to decide what is relevant to it and will simply ignore the rest.
Do you have a citation or epistemic status for this? I’m happy to deploy the PR as-is on the basis of your recommendation, but I’d be even happier with more knowledge of how confident to be.
My statement was really based on my experience and observations over the years as a practitioner in the field. SEO (which this falls under) is a core part of my regular day job and I consider it to be one of my strongest skills. I have 10+ years experience in the field and I have worked (and continue to work) on stuff like this almost on a daily basis. Because of this I’m very confident that my opinion is very likely correct (>90% confident).
Unfortunately I cannot point you to a specific citation or actually tell you with 100% confidence what exactly the Google algorithm will do or how exactly it works (only Google actually knows). Google is very secretive about how their algorithm works and most of the time SEOs can only offer (educated) guesses on how the algorithm probably works (guesses being based on past observations and measurements).
The Google algorithm is actually now very sophisticated and being able to filter signals while ignoring “noise” appears to be one of its strengths and modus operandus (this opinion is based on my (anecdotal and measured) observations over the years plus learnings from others in the field).
One more thing: It might take maybe up to between 1 and 3 months after the changes are made for more forum posts to start appearing in the scholar results. There is also some probability that they could appear sooner though.
It would be a great idea to enable it for all posts.
This forum has enough high quality scholarly content to qualify as an academic resource of note.
There will not be any issue with the Google algorithm at all. In fact Google actively encourages using these metadata for websites with content like EA forum has. The algorithm will be able to decide what is relevant to it and will simply ignore the rest.
With respect to the names, that also would not be a problem. The only consequence is that Google will store and display search results using the names they used. So if anyone likes to have their article to be associated with their real name they will need to use the real name in their post.
There will not be any other impact.
Also: Just in case someone prefers not to have their forum post indexed by Google scholar, there are ways to remove indexed entries . But I have a feeling hardly anyone would opt for that.
Thanks a bunch! This is really helpful.
Do you have a citation or epistemic status for this? I’m happy to deploy the PR as-is on the basis of your recommendation, but I’d be even happier with more knowledge of how confident to be.
My statement was really based on my experience and observations over the years as a practitioner in the field. SEO (which this falls under) is a core part of my regular day job and I consider it to be one of my strongest skills. I have 10+ years experience in the field and I have worked (and continue to work) on stuff like this almost on a daily basis. Because of this I’m very confident that my opinion is very likely correct (>90% confident).
Unfortunately I cannot point you to a specific citation or actually tell you with 100% confidence what exactly the Google algorithm will do or how exactly it works (only Google actually knows). Google is very secretive about how their algorithm works and most of the time SEOs can only offer (educated) guesses on how the algorithm probably works (guesses being based on past observations and measurements).
The Google algorithm is actually now very sophisticated and being able to filter signals while ignoring “noise” appears to be one of its strengths and modus operandus (this opinion is based on my (anecdotal and measured) observations over the years plus learnings from others in the field).
One more thing: It might take maybe up to between 1 and 3 months after the changes are made for more forum posts to start appearing in the scholar results. There is also some probability that they could appear sooner though.