Do SMF posts appear in search engines? (Something to be concerned about)

Started by geezmo, September 06, 2006, 09:16:08 PM

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geezmo

These are the links used in vB:

Look at this thread from vBulletin.com

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=142051

The links of posts 1-4 are:

QuotePost 1: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=884772&postcount=1
Post 2: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=884784&postcount=2
Post 3: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=884786&postcount=3
Post 4: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=884798&postcount=4

The links use a variety of URLs (p=884772&postcount=1, p=884784&postcount=2, p=884786&postcount=3, p=884798&postcount=4) while SMF uses:

Quotesite.com/?topic=123.0
site.com/?topic=123.msg1
site.com/?topic=123.msg2

Google probably hates the variations in the URL for the same page: msg1, .msg2, .msg3 ....

Harzem

Quote from: Ben_S on September 14, 2006, 08:09:58 PM
Quote from: HarzeM on September 14, 2006, 01:54:37 PM
SMF has about 21 links to the same page.

site.com/?topic=123.0
site.com/?topic=123.msg1
site.com/?topic=123.msg2
<>

vB does exactly the same thing.

No, at least I couldn't find any single duplicate link up to now.

Geezmo pointed that but slightly wrong. The duplicate links in vB are single post links that include different content. Try clicking on geezmo's links and you'll see what I mean.

geezmo

At least we're going somewhere here. I hope the SMF coders are watching us here, cos this will definitely help solve the problem that's hindering SMF from being a forum that can beat vB. I hope Google would reply already to the question I sent them on why Google does not display SMF posts.

bjp

I agree. This is a real probleme. I have 2 boards, one is phpbb and the other is SMF. Phpbb is much more link by google.
for exemple:
- smf (361 483 messages) and only 3 250 présents in Google
- phpbb (372 601 messages) and only 54 211 présents in Google


geezmo

Hi Nikolas, good to see you here. I've installed your Archive mod last week, let's see if this is really effective and when this would bring results.

In any case, I think this should not stop SMF developers from finding out why Google does not list SMF threads as search results. Much is really being lost when an SMF forum does not appear in Google.

dave

I agree
i ran a phpnuke site  (yes i learned the hard way about it getting hacked also)
but all be dammed if i posted something the very next week it was in google no issues

then i switched my site over  *( after nuke was hacked) to smfand it ran for  a year or so
and the search engine stuff was never ever the same :(

although nuke got hacked i was slamming with hits and visitors...

I just re opened the site sunday with SMF again
there are few posts and it will grow again.. but i know the hits wont be the same

I run 2 sites now
handgunplace.com
and basslurereviews.com
both SMF




geezmo

Just discovered that Yahoo can properly index my forum and some of my forum posts appear as search results in Yahoo. Unfortunately, majority of net users use Google to search and that's where our forum posts fail to show up.

simonm


did anyone contacted google staff about it? what is theirs side of story ?

geezmo

No reply to my email in Google after a month :( There's also a pending question in the Google Groups board about SMF posts not appearing in Google but no one still has replied to it...

dave

I switched my bass site to Vb and vbseo and traffic has been great

geezmo

Wait for some months and those vB posts will appear in Google. Not sure whether posts in your SMF forum will be there too by that time. :(

Ben_S

The only reason I can think of for topics not doing to well is the duplicate links to the same content, google supports wildcards in robots.txt so something like this may help.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /forum/*.msg*
Disallow: /forum/*sa=showPosts*
Disallow: /forum/*prev_next*
Disallow: /forum/*action=printpage*
Disallow: /forum/*action=recent*
Liverpool FC Forum with 14 million+ posts.

geezmo

Have you already tried that in your site, Ben_S?

Went to your Liverpool FC forum, congrats, that's a really huge forum. But still are you not concerned  that out of 2.3 million posts, only 1,000+ entries appear in Google search results, and most are not even threads or posts?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aredandwhitekop.com%2Fforum&btnG=Google+Search

Google.com - site:redandwhitekop.com/forum

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,640 from redandwhitekop.com/forum for . (0.04 seconds)

Ben_S

Quote from: geezmo on October 26, 2006, 10:18:01 AM
Have you already tried that in your site, Ben_S?

I added it ~ 20 days ago, whether it helps or not will take a little while to show up.

The duplicate content issue is the only thing I can think of that would be causing topics not to index well, unless others have any thoughts on what may be causing it.
Liverpool FC Forum with 14 million+ posts.

Harzem

Quote from: HarzeM on September 14, 2006, 01:54:37 PM
Quote from: geezmo on September 14, 2006, 01:36:16 PM
@vbgamer45, I already sent an email to Google's support. Hopefully, they'd reply and you can use that to tweak SMF's codes.

Thanks for doing that. Please inform me about their reply.

vbgamer45, I don't know the problem but it can be the individual message links that connect to the same page. Google doesn't like different links to the same content, but SMF has about 21 links to the same page.

site.com/?topic=123.0
site.com/?topic=123.msg1
site.com/?topic=123.msg2
site.com/?topic=123.msg3
site.com/?topic=123.msg4
site.com/?topic=123.msg5
...
site.com/?topic=123.msg19
site.com/?topic=123.msg20


These are all the same page, but different links. Google doesn't like it.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Quote
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

I had also stated this in the first page.

vBulletin has links to posts exactly the same way, but not publicly. You only have those links in your emails. In regular surfing, these don't show up.

Maybe considerable for SMF ::)

geezmo

Hopefully we'll see some good results soon. I'll add those codes to my robots.txt file too.

RRasco

i hope we can find a solution to this soon.  i am currently redesigning my site to run SMF instead of phpBB.  i have a SEO for phpBB and every single one of my threads shows up in google.  its the word content on the threads that get me all my traffic, if i dont have google, i dont have traffic.
Vehicle Management System for SMF - SMFGarage.com

R-S_Doug

Oh dear, this is not cool. This google search for "Do SMF posts appear in search engines";

hxxp:www.google.com/search?q=%22Do+SMF+posts+appear+in+search+engines%22 [nonactive]

doesn't return any results*, and a search for "geezmo" returns only the profile and user statistics, no posts or threads.

:'(

*Update, now it does, one hit titled 'latest posts of dave'

Update two, this search;

hxxp:www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awww.simplemachines.org+geezmo&btnG=Search&meta= [nonactive]

gives 400+ results, so there are posts making it to the serps, they just don't rank.

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