As I already requested almost a year ago, there is a need for a substantial change in terms of SEO. If I search for any category or location my site does not appear on the first pages (a website that with other components is on the first page of Google). I purchased a plugin to try to solve the problem but this is the response from technical support:

The J-BusinessDirectory plugin not recognize the business category (Title, Description)

Do you mean that there aren't any mapping options available for the business category?

In BreadcrumbList missing the category (see scrennshot)

The Breadcrumbs Schema is created via the menu hierarchy provided by Joomla, so if Joomla doesn't provide us with category, it won't be available in the structured data.

Why would a customer pay to be on a website that no one can find?

Thanks and your follow up on this very important issue for JBD crucial SEO development results.

The screenshot doesnt work to see if thats something you want to share too.

And I can agree that this is important results if the SEO isnt working as it should: Why would a customer pay to be on a website that no one can find?

Let's take an example: a user who uses a search engine uses simple words for example restaurants in Naples. If we have the category restaurants with many restaurants in various locations but neither the category nor the location is recognized by the search engine, never any restaurant in my website will appear in search. The only way to find a restaurant would be to search with the name of the restaurant but at that point a web directory loses the meaning of existing, hoping that it will appear on the first search pages given the SEO errors that exist. Virtually useless, for any business it is a good investment. The development of JBD should follow this indication which is the basis for a good result

Thanks for clarifying your arguments and hope CMS junkies can improve and come up with a solution.

Cheers!

Still there is "web directories" that have great impact and I see this article about it 

20 Web Directories You’ll Still Want To Use

So the trick is to make your JBD directory to the top 20!  :) and

"As you search for web directories, keep those two criteria in mind.

Consider these questions before you start filling out your listing:

• Is this a reputable site? Put another way, if a customer saw me on this site, would they view my business as more – or less – legitimate?
• Is my target audience likely to visit this site? If not, it’s probably not worth listing your business.

Now, let’s get into what you came here for: the web directories that are still relevant today."

   https://www.searchenginejournal.com/web-directories-list/287799/

What is a problem for JBD business listings, offers and events is that it is not creating a url for the items.

Did you discover that and its not following Joomla std procedures of doing that and it could have an affect.. You can see this with Joomla std breadcrumbs module where JBD dont add that last JBD item to the trail.. an example.

Eliana Is there any update for this issue? Its very important and as you said about this topic hope there can be some improvements....

If this is of any help, then here is my experience:

For the category, type and city pages, I use 4SEO to input a canonical, a meta title and a meta description.  I also had to clean up the URLs for the type pages.
But this was still not enough - Google saw the pages as soft 404s.
After a lot of messing around, the only solution I can find that works is to develop a whole series of modules that create H1 and H2 headings for these pages and text about the category (eg given the example above - approx 300 words about the Naples restaurant scene).  
It is time-consuming to set up. However, it does work if you get the keywords into the text in a good way (and you can figure out the right keywords in the first place - which is easier said than done sometimes).

There's also a problem of search engines not always being able to see what's on the search pages if you use AJAX.  But if you want to use the search filters, then you have to use Ajax.  Google says it can see AJAX-generated pages these days - but in my experience, it's a bit hit-and-miss with the JBD pages.

I suspect that if JBD were asked to do this, they would charge it as a customisation fee to whoever asks and then roll it out in the next release to all users. In some ways, you'd want them to do that because then, at least, they would adopt the job of making sure that the improvements continue to work as php changes and Joomla launches new versions.

Thank you for your feedback.

For the Ajax search, in the general settings you can switch between static and Ajax search pages.
The search filters are not important for the search engines.

We also recommend using static and not Ajax when it comes to indexing.

The search filters are not important for the search engines.
If you are suggesting that we use static pages, then what is the value of your business directory?  As you know only AJAX pages have filters. If a user cannot filter the listings in a useful way, then there is no point in having a business directory at all.

It is true that Google is more likely to be able to read and then index static (PHP) pages, but Google is not the paying user. In short, UIUX demands filtering and it needs to be made to work.

In summary, using static pages does not make any business sense for a directory with more than a handful of listings.

Google knows that AJAX is crucial and has expressly stated that their robots can now read Ajax-generated pages. Yet, somehow, years later, JBD Ajax pages are still troublesome. Why?

Could it be that the libraries you use are out of date -and predate Google's shift to being able to index Ajax-generated pages?

For example, do you use jQuery to run these pages?  If yes, then the version of JQuery in your latest version is over five years old (2019.)

/*! jQuery UI - v1.12.1 - 2019-11-27
* http://jqueryui.com

https://jqueryui.com/download/all/  version 1.14.1 was released in October 2024.  

Is using out-of-date and no longer-supported libraries the main reason that AJAX-generated pages have such difficulty being indexed and highly ranked?  Sure you need good content too but if crawlers can't even see the carefully drafted content because the Ajax is not working according to modern protocols, then there's no point in using Ajax.
Its a vicious circle:
PHP (static only) = no UIUX for large directories = no traffic = no business.
If you are just going to list a few businesses, then you may as well just do it with a few well structured articles and maybe a website builder.

Ajax = good UIUX.  However, we all need it to work for web crawlers as well as human users. No SEO = no traffic = no business.

For your users, it is a lose-lose situation.

In short, please update those libraries and fix the ajax!

If you want to use the search results page entirely in Ajax while maintaining good SEO, we provide several options:

1. Listings Map – This menu item generates a structured sitemap for listings, ensuring that all categories and listings can be indexed.
2. Catalog – Another menu item type that functions as a sitemap but focuses solely on listings.

Regarding the concern about outdated libraries, the libraries we use do not prevent pages from being indexed. However, since we maintain compatibility with Joomla 3, 4, and 5, we currently need to support older libraries. That said, we recognize the importance of updates, and starting with JBD 5.0, we will upgrade to the latest versions to enhance both SEO and performance.

Let us know if you have any further questions or suggestions.