Hello Everyone!
I have had a website running for about 7 months now and have great results in a google/yahoo search results. I have recently added a SMF forum which I find to be a great "out of the box" experience. I have to admit I am not very experienced with PHP and because I am using a 3rd party theme I find it difficult to add Mods.
My question is since I added the forum at http://www.mywebsite.com/forum/, google only seems to be picking up my index.php and the calendar link. No posts or anything else. Is there something else I could be doing to get them to crawl the entire site? I assume it is because it is installed in a directory besides the root?
I know that some will suggest installing SMF sitemap which I have to get up the courage to try, as I mentioned earlier I have not had much success installing mods, even manually but am an eager student for anyones suggestions!
Cheers!
Mike
A lot of SEO improvement comes from its content, sites linking to you that are relevant to your topic area. Creating a really good post that other relevant sites link to helps as well.
You can enable SEO friendly URL's or even the SEO4SMF mod could help in your cause to improve your rankings. Focus on content and continue to build your site for your visitors.
If you build your site for visitors and they come then the search engine rankings will come as well.
I understand that the rank will take time to build. I appreciate your response and agree with it totally. We are trying to populate the forum with interesting articles and know in time this will help. We are also in the process of visiting other forums and posting links to our site. So, again I understand it takes time. I also have seo friendly links turned on.
I guess my question was more asking why the search engines only see the 2 links (index.php and calendar) at this time. There are posts in the forum (only 24 at this time), why did the bots not see them? Even when I use sitemap software (3rd party) external to SMF it also only sees the 2 links. Does this have anything to do with installing it in a directory in the root? www.mysite.com/forums/?
I hope this explains my question better.
To be perfectly honest. I've yet to see any way in which SEO-style urls help SEO wise.
(The only reason I can see is that some people think they look nicer/prettier)
Its recommended not to use software like GSiteCrawler (because it is very intensive on your server). There are some mods which can create SMF specific ones.
As for spiders. when a site is new, you'll usually get a sprinkling of pages listed with the first few weeks, and then gradually more and more.
However they won't index everypage. The higher your pagerank, (generated by the backlinks in the higher pagerank sites [the more the better], the more pages that will get indexed.
In my experience each search engines spider is different.
- Yahoo Slurp is very aggressive and can visit hundreds of time an hour.
- Google is more restrained and visiting slowly, but surely
- MSNBot is poor. (MSN only seem to value super-size sites, and not your average-small sites)
Backlinks are key. Appropriate ones in similar sites. Not just to your main/forum pages, but to individual topics aswell.
Thank you Karl for your reply. I will have to search to see what you refer to as "back links". Are you saying that having the forum in a sub-directory is fine? Such as www.gmpowertrain.ca/forum/ ? Thanks again for your help, it is very much appreciated!
Mike
Lainaus käyttäjältä: karlbenson - huhtikuu 18, 2008, 11:16:02 AP
To be perfectly honest. I've yet to see any way in which SEO-style urls help SEO wise.
(The only reason I can see is that some people think they look nicer/prettier)
Its recommended not to use software like GSiteCrawler (because it is very intensive on your server). There are some mods which can create SMF specific ones.
As for spiders. when a site is new, you'll usually get a sprinkling of pages listed with the first few weeks, and then gradually more and more.
However they won't index everypage. The higher your pagerank, (generated by the backlinks in the higher pagerank sites [the more the better], the more pages that will get indexed.
In my experience each search engines spider is different.
- Yahoo Slurp is very aggressive and can visit hundreds of time an hour.
- Google is more restrained and visiting slowly, but surely
- MSNBot is poor. (MSN only seem to value super-size sites, and not your average-small sites)
Backlinks are key. Appropriate ones in similar sites. Not just to your main/forum pages, but to individual topics aswell.
Back links are incoming links to specific topics etc. I.e me linking to a specific topic say this one I just posted using the url:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=234841.0 posted from my own site for example.
Some say yes and some say no regarding URL freindly pages. I personally would say that they don't play as bigger role as they once used to because we know that spiders can crawl dynamic pages just like regular html created pages.
There maybe some weight in the keyword being included in the web page, though not huge may well prove relevant when your ranked for a search term. Rather than looking at how many pages you have ranked or listed I would look for specific search terms you want to gain rankings on and get links inward to specific posts that are content rich in that area.