Linkbacks (reflection links showing "topics that link here") were
incorrectly using schema.org/ItemList markup. This caused Google Rich
Results Test errors ("Multiple ListItem elements defined on page") when
combined with plugins like discourse-ai that add their own ItemList for
related topics.
ItemList is intended for curated/ranked lists (e.g., "Related Topics").
Linkbacks are automatic citations, not recommendations, so plain links
are semantically correct.
Also extracts `linkbacks_for(post)` helper to TopicView for cleaner
template code.
Internal ref - t/170560
Many moons ago there was a
[fix](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/24595) to category
urls in crawler view for a topic, due to subfolder.
The old fix solved subfolders, but fumbled subcategories. This fix
caters for both, such that subcategory links won't use its parent's URL.
When crawlers visit a post-specific URL like `/t/-/{topic-id}/{post-number}`, we use the canonical to direct them to the appropriate crawler-optimised paginated view (e.g. `?page=3`).
However, analysis of google results shows that the post-specific URLs are still being included in the index. Google doesn't tell us exactly why this is happening. However, as a general rule, 'A large portion of the duplicate page's content should be present on the canonical version'.
In our previous implementation, this wasn't 100% true all the time. That's because a request for a post-specific URL would include posts 'surrounding' that post, and won't exactly conform to the page boundaries which are used in the canonical version of the page. Essentially: in some cases, the content of the post-specific pages would include many posts which were not present on the canonical paginated version.
This commit aims to resolve that problem by simplifying the implementation. Instead of rendering posts surrounding the target post_number, we will only render the target post, and include a link to 'show post in topic'. With this new implementation, 100% of the post-specific page content will be present on the canonical paginated version, which will hopefully mean google reduces their indexing of the non-canonical post-specific pages.
The most common thing that we do with fab! is:
fab!(:thing) { Fabricate(:thing) }
This commit adds a shorthand for this which is just simply:
fab!(:thing)
i.e. If you omit the block, then, by default, you'll get a `Fabricate`d object using the fabricator of the same name.
Previously, we used the schema type "DiscussionForumPosting" for all the posts including replies. This is not recommended as per Google search experts. This commit changes the schema type to "Comment" for replies.
This simplifies the crawler-linkback-list to only be a point of reference to the actual DiscussionForumPosting objects.
See "Summary page": https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/carousel?hl=en#summary-page
> [It] defines an ItemList, where each ListItem has only three properties: @type (set to ListItem), position (the position in the list), and url (the URL of a page with full details about that item).
Régis Hanol
Natalie Tay
David Taylor
Jarek Radosz
Natalie Tay
Daniel Waterworth
Vinoth Kannan
Loïc Guitaut
Ayke Halder
Phil Pirozhkov