Almost ready to give up on SMF

[青山 素子]

Some things have been updated in SMF 1.1 final to help indexing duplicate content.

I wish I was having the duplicate indexing problem.......But i am getting nothing....

Sorry for the delay in posting, but it has been really hectic in my life.

The duplicate indexing thing was a possible problem. Basically, Google sees a bunch of links with the exact same content and its spam triggers go off and it ignores all pages with that content. That is the theory at least (Google isn't about to say how things work). The changes in 1.1 were made to keep all but the main thread pages from being indexed (preventing multiple links to the same material).

[dupont24]

Thanks for your help......but I have now switched several of my boards to a different bb.... I am waiting to see how google indexes them... If google does index them when it would not with smf.... I will be completing the change for all.  Just a little update within hours of the switch googlebots were actively crawling threads/posts, witch they were NOT doing on the smf board.    I really wish smf had real seo efforts in place, as I still say it is by far the most user friendly application.  But I cannot be invisible to search engines. 

I would and will have no problem trying smf again when the seo issue is truly fixed and not just speculated that it is fixed as has been the case so far.

[Dannii]

http://www.sprintcupfans.com/robots.txt
Where are the lines blocking msg urls, and prev_next? Those at least definately should be.
Why does your theme not use any <h#> tags?

I find it ironic that those who claim that SMF has bad SEO stuff don't seem to try very hard to optimise their forum.

And my pretty urls mod is definately making a lot of progress!

[wibo]

I've installed the new version 1.1 and google crawls less then in 1.1rc3.
Almost no pages are presented in google.
I used a sitemap, I partecipate ad adwords.
Nothing works.

Google indexed this month (1 to 13 december): 2.49 MB 233+19 hits from my forum
(yahoo more then 10 times).

I installed the 1.1 version 2 december.

[wibo]

Some things have been updated in SMF 1.1 final to help indexing duplicate content.

I wish I was having the duplicate indexing problem.......But i am getting nothing....

Sorry for the delay in posting, but it has been really hectic in my life.

The duplicate indexing thing was a possible problem. Basically, Google sees a bunch of links with the exact same content and its spam triggers go off and it ignores all pages with that content. That is the theory at least (Google isn't about to say how things work). The changes in 1.1 were made to keep all but the main thread pages from being indexed (preventing multiple links to the same material).

If you have a sitemap you do not need noindex code in 1.1, isn't it?
(I deleted the noindex code... google dit not crawl my site anymore since 1.1 version)

[Dannii]

Sitemaps help search engines find your forum pages. You still don't want them to have duplicate content so the noindex code will still be useful.

Btw, upgrading from 1.1 RC3 to 1.1 could not make your forum be crawled less, as the urls are still formatted exactly the same. However, if your previous index was filled with .msg pages, then it might take a little while for it to be filled with proper pages.

[wibo]

I wish I was having the duplicate indexing problem.......But i am getting nothing....

I have tried everything and SMF threads/ posts are invisible 99% of the time to spiders.

For those that support seo in smf.... thats fine continue to support it.....  I now know SMF is  great forum software but is the worst for seo.  Not all folks need indexing so thats fine...  I however do want to be on an island in the world wide web.... SMF is putting my site there quickly.


With vbulletin 9000 plus pages indexed in the last 18 months

With SMF in the first week.....50  not bad except not one was content related
week 2 nothing
week 3  50 reduced to 19

Contrary to what some believe there is an issue with spider and smf.

I wish there was not but there is.  I have done my homework now and will be changing to a bb that indexes substantially better....


Heres on more example.... I tried this for my own benefit.....setup a site with 8 html content pages....very basic...  I also added SMF with a link from every page to the forum.  added the site to my webmaster account with google... it was spidered and indexed in less than a week... ALL 8 HTML....and still 2 weeks later the forum only has the index.php indexed....not 1 post.

That speaks volumes to me.

You folks are all great here and i wish you the best of luck and thank you for all your help.

Just a question Dupont: which theme are you using?

[wibo]

I just looked to the simplemachines.org community in google:

There are almost no community page in google:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=site:www.simplemachines.org&hl=en&lr=&start=160&sa=N

All pages have the same template structure in smf (and same keywords)
Is it possible that this could be the problem?

[青山 素子]

I just looked to the simplemachines.org community in google:

There are almost no community page in google:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=site:www.simplemachines.org&hl=en&lr=&start=160&sa=N

All pages have the same template structure in smf (and same keywords)
Is it possible that this could be the problem?

Doing a search with: http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:simplemachines.org/community&filter=0
(allinurl restricts to pages that he specific things in their url, makes for nice filtering).

Google's response: Results 1 - 10 of about 37,800 for allinurl:simplemachines.org/community. (0.04 seconds)

[Kindred]

40konline.com does not have SEO on at all... and it's wrapped with Joomla...

And yet, 1 - 10 of about 11,800 for allinurl:40konline.com.

and the indexing will only get better now that I have some additional fixes in place for the page titles.

[wibo]

40konline.com does not have SEO on at all... and it's wrapped with Joomla...

And yet, 1 - 10 of about 11,800 for allinurl:40konline.com.

and the indexing will only get better now that I have some additional fixes in place for the page titles.

Where do you see this kindred?
I looked in google with this search words: allinurl:40konline.com
there are only 2 pages coming back

[青山 素子]

Follow the link marked "repeat the search with the omitted results included"

[Harro]

My forum also doesn't really have problems.
Did install a SEO mod though.
Got around 1040 pages indexed.
With only 320 topics and 1854 posts this is pretty good in my opinion...

[wibo]

My forum also doesn't really have problems.
Did install a SEO mod though.
Got around 1040 pages indexed.
With only 320 topics and 1854 posts this is pretty good in my opinion...

and a google page ranking of 5
That's quit good.

[Defiant]

My forum also doesn't really have problems.
Did install a SEO mod though.
Got around 1040 pages indexed.
With only 320 topics and 1854 posts this is pretty good in my opinion...

I would love to instal the SEO mod anything to help with the bots because they all seem to hate SMF (Never had problems with others) but

Installing this package will perform the following actions:  Type Action Description
1. Execute Modification ./Sources/Display.php Test failed
2. Execute Modification ./Themes/default/index.template.php Test successful

1.1 final

[Kindred]

again... where is your proof that bots hate SMF?

As I already said, my forums are constantly being hit by bots...   at any hour of the day, I have google, msn or yahoo cruising the sites... and in my records, I have about a dozen other bots as well...

and I do not have SEO turned on.... not only that, but my sites are wrapped in Joomla, which makes the url even more "complicated"

[Defiant]

Yep I usually have about 3 Yahoo bots a day on the site and MSN turns up quite often too but I can't give evidence regarding google because its only been twice in 3/4 months

[青山 素子]

I would love to instal the SEO mod anything to help with the bots because they all seem to hate SMF (Never had problems with others) but

The problem is that the treatment of SMF seems to vary, so we can't explicitly say that SMF is a problem. Kindred's forum is quite well indexed, as is mine. Probably the worst forum indexing I'm seeing is a board that is still back on the 1.0 series (I plan to update it in the next two weeks).

We don't have overwhelming proof that bots like or dislike SMF, and that makes it harder to say just what is going on in total. It is especially not helpful that the search engines won't give info on what they are doing (but that would be suicide for them).

[dupont24]

http://www.sprintcupfans.com/robots.txt
Where are the lines blocking msg urls, and prev_next? Those at least definately should be.
Why does your theme not use any <h#> tags?

I find it ironic that those who claim that SMF has bad SEO stuff don't seem to try very hard to optimise their forum.

And my pretty urls mod is definately making a lot of progress!

I removed robots.txt to see if that was the problem...... My webmaster google account clearly showed it had seen and followed the robots.txt

I added dynamic keyword meta tags.

I added friendly url's

I added sitemaps.

I have tried everything publically available.

I find it ironic that there are SO many that say this is a smf seo issue...it is not isolated....and I find it ironic that peeps that defend it (most) have not expierenced google indexing 50 plus pages aday then switch to smf and hit a brick wall....

Please do insinuate I have not made an effort to make seo work.... I have spent countless hours on this.

Bottom line I already have had pages with a different bb indexed in under 10 days.....when running smf with the same identical posts/threads NONE were indexed.

BTW.... the other BB has had NO seo changes...not even url.


I am running the out of box smf no special theme...nothing but the finished product.

unless someone can point to a single board that has over 75 percent indexed I am done with SMF for now...... and yes my Vbulletin had over 90 percent indexed.

[青山 素子]

One of the boards I run: http://forum.staticsubs.org/

I mentioned my increase in spidering in a different thread. I went from around 95 items on a Wednesday to 414 on a Saturday (about 110 pages added a day on average), to 600 on Monday,  then 681 the next day, where I am currently hovering around. The site has about 989 topics, with about 100 not viewable by any guests, making about 880 topics viewable by guests.

681 / 880 ~= 0.77386 * 100 ~= 77.4 percent.

And all this without any attempt at optimization, no sitemap, no dynamic meta tags (in fact, it is still set to the defaults).

As I said in that other thread:

With my site, we are actually competing against our old site (usually #1 on searches for the name). With the combination of moving to 1.1 final, adding more content to be indexed, and getting similar sites to link to our new site, things seem to be improving.

Also remember that Google is a moving target. They update their search algorithms somewhat often, and have in the past, dropped huge numbers of pages from their indexes. Moving to a different system might just gain pages in the index because they are new to the crawler, not because that software is necessarily better.