The Ultimate Checklist to Optimize your Website for Google Scholar

Are you looking for optimizing Google Scholar for your site and get more traffic from this platform?

In this post, we will be looking at Google Scholar, how to optimize for it following the best practices.

What is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar is Google’s academic platform that includes:

• Articles
• Reports
• Online books
• Theses 
• Abstracts 
• Court opinions
  and other materials from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories. We can say that Google Scholar is a Web search engine that specifically searches scholarly literature and academic resources.

What is the difference between Google and Google Scholar?

Google Scholar focuses on the scholarly literature available on the web. By scholarly literature, Google means publications that are based on the results of research or studies. Google, on the other hand, has a broader scope and retrieves resources regardless of where online they come from.  Resources in a Google search do not have to be scholarly and do not have to be based on research.

Who can use Google Scholar?

• Students in general
• University student
• Researchers
• Journalists
• Staff can use the Libraries

The Ultimate Checklist to Rank for Google Scholar

Now we will look on how to optimize your site for Google Scholar starting from Google’s Guidelines for Webmasters and including the best particles.

Ensure that Google Scholar can crawl your site, find articles and relative papers

• Set up Google Search Console. Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.
• Generate and submit a Sitemap. A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, PDFs, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. Make sure that your site maps include all the pages and PDFs that contain your scholarly content
• Create a Robots.txt file, it is a text file that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site to crawl and which not to crawl. Ensure that your scholarly content is always crawled by search engines.
• Make sure that the URL of every article is reachable from the homepage by following at most ten simple HTML links.
• Your website must make either the full text of the articles or their complete author-written abstracts freely available and easy to see when users click on your URLs in Google search results.
  

Your website must not require users (or search robots) to sign in

Your website must not require users (or search robots) to sign in, install special software, accept disclaimers, dismiss popup or interstitial advertisements, click on links or buttons, or scroll down the page before they can read the entire abstract of the paper.

Optimize your scholarly papers for Google Scholar

• Ensure that the content hosted on your website consists primarily of scholarly articles – journal papers, conference papers, technical reports, or their drafts, dissertations, pre-prints, post-prints, or abstracts. Content such as news or magazine articles, book reviews, and editorials is not appropriate for Google Scholar. 
• Documents larger than 5MB, such as books and long dissertations, should be uploaded to Google Book Search; Google Scholar automatically includes scholarly works from Google Book Search.
• The full text of your paper is in a PDF file that ends with “.pdf”
• The title of the paper appears in a large font on top of the first page
• The authors of the paper are listed right below the title on a separate line
• There’s a bibliography section titled, e.g., “References” or “Bibliography” at the end
• Your files need to be either in HTML or PDF format. PDF files must have searchable text, i.e., you must be able to search for and find words in the document using Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Use structured data by adding scholarly article schema markup

This is my favorite tool to rank in Google Scholar. It’s a very powerful way to communicate your scholarly content for the search engine using structured data.

Structured data can come in a few different forms. At its base level, structured data is a process of marking up your website so search engines can quickly crawl your page.

When you markup your page, you specify exactly what kind of content will be on that page, and any specifics that go along with that content so it will be useful for:

• Helping search engine gain confidence
• Build your own knowledge graph 
• Improve linking data on your website

What does ScholarlyArticle markup look like?

Here I want to share with you some of the optimizations I applied on The Arab Media & Society website.
Arab Media & Society is a primary resource for media research. The journal, published biannually online and in print, offers peer-reviewed scholarly research and analysis on a wide array of topics pertaining to the dynamic media landscape across the Arab world.

Problem:
Their traffic from Google Scholar was very limited even if the number of scholarly papers was high.

Solution:

1. Resolving crawl issues
2. Optimize PDFs title, captures, and descriptions for all Papers
3. Apply ScholarlyArticle Markup for all papers
4. Improve E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) by creating person entities for authors and linked to their knowledge graph

Results:
In the first month after applying all the optimizations we notice a 61% organic traffic increase from Google Scholar.

here is a example of how ScholarlyArticle looks like on on of the scholarly papers of this site:

Improve E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

E‑A-T- stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. So why is having expertise, authority, and trust so significant?
Essentially, E-A-T determines a website’s value. 

Quality raters keep E-A-T in mind when judging how good a site or page provides what they need. They look to see if they’re getting a good online experience and if the content meets their standards. If the raters feel like a user would feel comfortable reading, sharing, and recommending the content, that earns the site a high level of E-A-T.

Consider E-A-T the reason why customers would choose your site over your competition. E-A-T could immediately affect how Google sees your site.

Structured data helps establish and solidify the relationship between entities, Using structured data to establish these relationships can streamline Google’s ability to assess the E-A-T of a given page, website, or entity, because it can help:

Structured data builds up the connection between entities, and this will help Google better understand the data behind and improve E-A-T.

Without confidence about what entities are included on a page, it could be difficult for search engines to accurately assess the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of those entities.

How to Improve E-A-T for Google Scholar?

1. Create a Person Entity for each author
2. Enrich the Person Entity by adding some extra information related to the website of the author, official page, LinkedIn Profile, Social .. etc .. This will make it much easier for the search engine to collect all the information about the author and trust your site
3. Connect all the articles related to a specific author with its Person Entity

What does Person markup look like?

here is an example for the Person Entity for the author if the Scholarly Article markup mentioned previously on this article.