No Search Engine Traffic To Forum!

brandondrury · June 06, 2006, 05:36:23 PM

Hello,

After starting my forum with SMF (1.0.5) back in September of 2005, my logs tell me that I haven't gotten a single unique hit from the search engines directly to a certain thread. My site is still very small, but I've gotten close to 30,000 search engine hits to other parts of my site in that same time.
There is an obvious flaw in my system, here. Before I go blaming the SEO capabilities of SMF, I wanted to see if I had made any mistakes. I'm almost finished with a total site redesign which included the creation of my first SMF theme (I'm using 1.0.7 now). I noticed in my index.template.php has fixed meta tags. This means that when I setup the forum originally, I must have gotten in there and typed in 20 or so keywords that I wanted to rank for. Is it possible that all my sites appear to be the same because they are all using identical meta tags? I didn't think the search engines payed THAT much attention to meta tags.
So I have a few questions:
1)Are you guys getting traffic to specific threads from the search engines?
2)How have you guys set the meta tags for your site?
3)When you type "site:yourdomain.com" do individual threads show up from your SMF forums? Mine do not!
Just a little background info. My domain is 9 months old right now. I spend about $200 on directory submissions when I first started it. The site has been consistently updated about twice a week with new articles. My forum has about 250 members and 6,000 posts. As I said above, the remaining portion of my site has gotten about 30,000 uniques. There is obviously a problem with either the way I have setup SMF or with SMF itself.
I do have search engine friendly URLs checked on.

Thanks,
Brandon Drury

brandondrury · June 06, 2006, 05:46:56 PM

Btw, I just tried searching for a specific thread posted on SMF and it came up in Google. When I searched for a specific topic in quotes (posted about a month ago) on my site, my index page was the only thing that came up (it has the RecentTopics SSI thingy on it).
This tells me that there is something different between our sites. Obviously, simplemachines.org is killing me in traffic, PR, etc. But I should at least have a few topics showing up in the search engines.

Brandon

Trekkie101 · June 06, 2006, 05:51:11 PM

Could we please have a link to your site

?

Niteblade · June 06, 2006, 07:02:53 PM

Quote2)How have you guys set the meta tags for your site?

Edit the index.template.php file for the particular theme(s) that you are using -- by searching for "META" using a text editor such as Notepad2. There, you will see that SMF comes with default META tags, which you will need to customize for your paricular site.

Example from mine:

Code Select

	// Show right to left and the character set for ease of translating.
	echo '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
	<title>The Pennyquick Forum - Due Diligence on NYSE, NASDAQ, OTCBB, and Pinksheet Stock, bonds, and mutual funds.</title>
	<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"', $context['right_to_left'] ? ' dir="rtl"' : '', '><head>

	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=', $context['character_set'], '" />
	<meta name="description" content="', $context['page_title'], '" />
	<meta name="keywords" content="PHP, MySQL, bulletin, board, community, open, source, smf, simple, machines, DD, Due Diligence, NYSE, NASDAQ, OTCBB, Pinksheets, Financial, Dreamhost, Credit, Home Loans, Auto Loans, Debt-free, Profit, Trading, Penny, Money" />
	<meta name="Description" CONTENT="Due diligence on NYSE, NASDAQ, OTCBB, and Pinksheet stocks, as well as financial investment advice on credit cards, home and auto loans in order to accomplish a debt-free and profitable lifestyle.">
	<meta name="Author" CONTENT="[email protected]">
	<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="', $settings['default_theme_url'], '/script.js?rc2p"></script>
	<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"><!-- // --><![CDATA[
		var smf_theme_url = "', $settings['theme_url'], '";
		var smf_images_url = "', $settings['images_url'], '";
		var smf_scripturl = "', $scripturl, '";
	// ]]></script>
	<title>', $context['page_title'], '</title>';

Quote3)When you type "site:yourdomain.com" do individual threads show up from your SMF forums

No; not for my site. Not yet. Of course, I do not have the content, yet. I have installed the google sitemap file for SMF that is used to generate an XML feed for Google Sitemaps. Have you considered sinking $5.00 into Adsense ?

There is a mod for SMF v1.0.7 that was recently created that will make your forum have sexy and decriptive links for SEO -- you might want to install that modification, even though it's still beta.

brandondrury · June 06, 2006, 07:10:29 PM

Thanks for the reply. I'm sorry, but I should have been more clear in my statement. I know how to change meta tags. (I custom built the entire template). My question had more to do with how people with successful forums with individual threads in the search engines were setting their meta tags.

I've completely removed all meta tags from my site, except for the "page_title" or whatever variable it is. However, I have a feeling that this isn't going to completely solve my problem.

My forum can be found at: http://www.recordingreview.com/forum/

......

Well after doing some more research, it appears the forum is getting spidered by MSN and Yahoo now that I've killed the meta tags. Google seams to be ignoring it.

Brandon

Niteblade · June 06, 2006, 08:26:55 PM

Moreoever; have you submitted your site to something like ineedhits.com ? I did the 'free' submission last month.. and am paiding $2.50 to have it done on a monthly basis thereafter. I don't know if this would help you or not. Google ignores my site, too. MSN, however, seems to love it. Good luck.

There is a forum member that has a board setup to specifically deal with such issues... it is a new board, but I would rather post in a fellow member's board than someplace else on the internet. wmnation.com is the site.

brandondrury · June 06, 2006, 11:55:12 PM

What is "ineedhits.com" going to do for me? Search engines don't need to be submitted to. They base a very large chunk of their rankings on links pointing to your domain name. I couldn't imagine what purpose a search engine submission would serve.

My site doesn't have a problem with Google. (Sure, I could be ranking better). My forum has a problem with Google. That's why I'm here....to make sure it's not a technical problem.

Brandon

Niteblade · June 07, 2006, 12:50:02 AM

Oh. Then I suppose you haven't searched this forum yet.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=50939.0
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=77484.0
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=34499.0
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=31809.0

And so forth.

SEO · June 07, 2006, 02:07:36 AM

Sometimes i just shake my head in astonishment.

brandondrury · June 07, 2006, 02:19:28 AM

QuoteSometimes i just shake my head in astonishment.

Me too. Which side are you on?

I read all of those posts. Never do they say anywhere that Google gives equal ranking to a page in SMF as it does to Wordpress or Articlelive (two other scripts I've had MUCH better luck ranking with). They do say that SMF is spiderable. That's great, but I want rankings. The spider part is a given in my opinion. I realize that simplemachines.org seams to rank well. Being a PR powerhouse seams to compensate in Google. A much smaller site like mine can barely get Articelive and Wordpress posts in Google, my site is just too weak to get SMF in there.

When I first started my site back in September, I toyed with the notion of using a Wordpress blog. I did it for about a month but decided against it. I just sort of left it up and forgot about it. It turns out that this blog is DESTROYING my forum in traffic from SE's. The blog has like 20 entries. My forum has 6,000 posts. The content in the blogs is usually one line sentences linking to my articles in Articlelive. My forum is filled with long posts and discussions that are keyword heavy.

The tech guys on this forum (who I highly respect) are generally more concerned with the speed and security of SMF (which they have 100% succeeded in my opinion). But the bottom line is I can't make any money with my SMF forum (from SEs anyway) and that's killing me from a business standpoint.

SEO · June 07, 2006, 02:38:14 AM

I am not an anyones side as their is no sides to take.

I fought and fought to get people to try and understand the difference between spidering/indexing and rankings on here.

Most of them dont get it but thats ok because if everyone understood it the search engines would be full of forums competing with us.

Chill man,, its all in hand.

There is a lot you could do to help your site.
Ineedhits is not one of them

We are still working on the seo hack and making sure things are cool with it.
So far it is working very well for google but i am not sure about yahoo yet until i have more data.
Msn just indexes and ranks everything so that was never a problem.

motumbo · June 07, 2006, 05:30:10 AM

Search engines don't drill down infinitely. Yahoo and MSN don't go down to the thread level in my board. Those search engines do, however, read data from the "jump to" box.

I want to get rid of that "jump to" box, but if I do my traffic is going to crash. It's a dilema.

redone · June 07, 2006, 08:56:09 AM

I would concentrate on building good quality content and certainly getting decent inbound links from relevant sites. I personally would not bother with ineedhits or anything like that. as its a waste of time.

brandondrury · June 07, 2006, 03:50:13 PM

I don't want this forum to get off topic. Website101 says that creating great content and getting links from other quality sites will improve rankings. I'm aware of this and I'm practicing it. However, when my logs say that sMF hasn't brought me a single hit from the search engines, something is wrong.

Right now it's 30,000 for Articelive ..... 0 for SMF!

Brandon

Niteblade · June 07, 2006, 09:32:32 PM

Quote from: redone on June 07, 2006, 08:56:09 AMI personally would not bother with ineedhits or anything like that. as its a waste of time.

As a first time webmaster, I'm still learning the trade. I suppose that if you're correct, then sites like ineedhits.com are targeted to new webmasters alone. In other words, sites like that make their money from ignorant people like myself. (Ignorant is not the same as stupid.) However, my logic, and my logic can be flawed, in using them is that they offered to submit my URL to a variety of search engines. And in my mind, those search engines, when they became aware that my website existed, sent their spiders to my site for the purpose of indexing my site. The spiders would add the content of the pages that I have to their representative search engines. Although my website's content is not as intricate or detailed as other members, my main reason to use their service was "to prepare" the search engines for my site's arrival. By using ineedhits, I am in fact saying "I exist! Add my site and my future content to your search engine!" Moreover, the majority of the spiders would "see" that I have my meta tags associated with certain key words -- when those key words are inputting into the search engine's query box, then my site has a chance of being returned as a search result.

(And if my site is clicked on through the use of a search engine with a high pagerank (PR), would not that in turn help influence my own PR ?)

However, if my site is buried within 300,000 or even 1,000,000 search results from other sites that use the same keywords and meta tags, then my ranking would be said to be low. (And it would continue to be low until my site gets clicks from other sites that have decent pageranks.) Since on some search engines, ranking is a function of link pervasiveness, that is, website ranking is somehow porportional to the presence of the link on other sites on the internet, then while my indexed content would be high, my ranking would be low.

Hence,

Quote from: redone on June 07, 2006, 08:56:09 AMI would concentrate on building good quality content and certainly getting decent inbound links from relevant sites.

Do I have it down correctly? Like I said, this is my first time at running a site.

Techdomain · June 08, 2006, 03:56:14 AM

QuoteThat's great, but I want rankings

Search engines look harder at sites with massive regular changes in content. other then that they usually only go a few levels to see what (if anything has changed). The more references to one item, and the more updates to those references (eg heaps of posts on one topic, and new ones every time the search engine looks) will improve rankings.

The other good way to get a particular thread indexed is to put a plain text link to the thread on the front page - eg the menu top left here

also be sure to check the robots.txt file, to make sure that no areas of your site (that you do want indexed) are off limits - though if you have not edited that, it is usually ok.

finally, as you have mentioned, it is a case of using good and relevant meta's, and keeping your fingers crossed! Getting your link on heaps of other sites will help also - makes the search engines see your site as more "relevant" because it is linked to heaps of times.

I, Brian · June 08, 2006, 06:58:05 AM

Quote from: brandondrury on June 06, 2006, 05:46:56 PM
Btw, I just tried searching for a specific thread posted on SMF and it came up in Google. When I searched for a specific topic in quotes (posted about a month ago) on my site, my index page was the only thing that came up (it has the RecentTopics SSI thingy on it).
This tells me that there is something different between our sites. Obviously, simplemachines.org is killing me in traffic, PR, etc. But I should at least have a few topics showing up in the search engines.

Brandon

Google *is* having problems at the moment, since moving to a new datacenter infrastructure earlier in the year:
http://www.platinax.co.uk/news/11-05-2006/google-is-broken/

At present, a number of sites aren't showing as properly indexed - I had a major site disappear for a few days completely, then re-appear again.

Another point - if your site is being found for some topics but not others, then it's likely an SEO issue rather than a SMF one.

forumposters · July 30, 2006, 01:50:45 AM

Quote from: nite0859 on June 06, 2006, 07:02:53 PM

Example from mine:
Code Select Expand
// Show right to left and the character set for ease of translating. echo '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <title>The Pennyquick Forum - Due Diligence on NYSE, NASDAQ, OTCBB, and Pinksheet Stock, bonds, and mutual funds.</title> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"', $context['right_to_left'] ? ' dir="rtl"' : '', '><head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=', $context['character_set'], '" /> <meta name="description" content="', $context['page_title'], '" /> <meta name="keywords" content="PHP, MySQL, bulletin, board, community, open, source, smf, simple, machines, DD, Due Diligence, NYSE, NASDAQ, OTCBB, Pinksheets, Financial, Dreamhost, Credit, Home Loans, Auto Loans, Debt-free, Profit, Trading, Penny, Money" /> <meta name="Description" CONTENT="Due diligence on NYSE, NASDAQ, OTCBB, and Pinksheet stocks, as well as financial investment advice on credit cards, home and auto loans in order to accomplish a debt-free and profitable lifestyle."> <meta name="Author" CONTENT="[email protected]"> <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="', $settings['default_theme_url'], '/script.js?rc2p"></script> <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"><![CDATA[ var smf_theme_url = "', $settings['theme_url'], '"; var smf_images_url = "', $settings['images_url'], '"; var smf_scripturl = "', $scripturl, '"; // ]]></script> <title>', $context['page_title'], '</title>';

There is a mod for SMF v1.0.7 that was recently created that will make your forum have sexy and decriptive links for SEO -- you might want to install that modification, even though it's still beta.

What is the name of this mod please?

And, I noticed you have two lines for the <meta name="description" tag. Can you do that? Won't search engines just use one or the other and not both of them?

motumbo · July 30, 2006, 08:48:12 PM

Quote from: I, Brian on June 08, 2006, 06:58:05 AM

Google *is* having problems at the moment,

Google has been having nothing but problems for two years now. LOL

From what I've read, here is how to get your site deep indexed by Google and indexed faster: buy some Adwords advertising (be prepared to spend) or put Adsense on your site. If you don't, you can wait up to a year for Google to deep index your site.

SEO · July 31, 2006, 12:32:22 AM

Quote from: motumbo on July 30, 2006, 08:48:12 PM
Quote from: I, Brian on June 08, 2006, 06:58:05 AM

Google *is* having problems at the moment,

Google has been having nothing but problems for two years now. LOL

From what I've read, here is how to get your site deep indexed by Google and indexed faster: buy some Adwords advertising (be prepared to spend) or put Adsense on your site. If you don't, you can wait up to a year for Google to deep index your site.

not true
just get backlinks to your internal pages if you are using smfseo.

if you arent using it then just prey and hope.

and forumposters you are right
the two descriptions are not good.
this needs removing.
<meta name="description" content="', $context['page_title'], '" />

News:

No Search Engine Traffic To Forum!