Another important update to steemit.com has happened, which will should have a significant impact upon Steemit's Search Ranking.

It's a change that will go (has gone) unnoticed to most users but with a few tweaks to how people work, could provide a huge boost to Steemit's visibility on search engines.

^Source

1. Community Names

The community name will now appear in the URL. So if you write a post in The World of Sports, your post will contain 'the-world-of-sports' in the URL.

Why is this important?

The URL forms an important part of Google's search algorithm. If a user searches for "Sports" and we have lots of unique, good quality content in "The World of Sports", then Steemit's results are more likely to appear.

This also highlights the importance of posting in appropriate communities. Writing about Sport in "The World of Sports", will give Steemit a better search ranking than if you post it in any other community.

2. 1st Hashtag

Some communities are made up of characters that are not ASCII friendly so where this is the case, the URL will now use the first hashtag.

We've long advised that users use appropriate hashtags, but a recent review of the 1st hashtag being used, across a small sample of posts suggested that over 70% of posts have an "irrelevant" 1st tag.

Whilst you might feel that # club5050 is the most important thing for your upvotes, https://steemit.com/club5050/.... this provides absolutely no benefit to Steemit's ranking.

So please - spread the word. If your community has a meaningless name, unrelated to the content being shared (😜), think about making it more meaningful so that all content on Steemit becomes more SEO friendly.

This should all mean that in time, we'll start to see more recent content appear in search results.