SMF SEO Unfriendly?

[metallica48423]

i'm not sure how thats irrelevant.

Have we all forgotten that google is still to this day heavily influenced by backlinks... the very thing that it was initially based on?

i won't deny that there are enhancements that can be done, and that several that already have been.

[chadon]

 Yes we all know that but not all sites are like simplemachines.org. If visitors know where to go to find the content, we should be able to show what search engines should crawl. That's not the case.
All we need are little modifications to the linking system. That's not a major rewriting of the software. No forum need to have their help, login or print pages indexed so it's not about what users want or not. Most forums or CMS softwares are SEO unfriendly but it doesn't mean SMF can't be the first exception to the rule especially when it's that easy to do.
Being SEO friendly or not is more than just having all our topics indexed but if this can't be done, then it's very SEO unfriendly.

[SleePy]

This topic was active for the last time in 2001  I bet you found it in page # 2500. That would explain why it's not indexed.
Webhostingtalk has over a million pages indexed by Google. Simplemachines.org has only 107.000 pages indexed (most of them are probably not topic pages). Isn't there a problem somewhere?

As I said, it was pulled by random. I went there. Clicked a thread and then changed the post id to be some random number. This a recent topic
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webhostingtalk.com%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D691760&btnG=Search

I even went back another month and tried that and same result.

We have tried to improve SEO in 2.0 thanks to the help of a few big board users using 2.0 and testing it out for us.

[Dannii]

If they are linked from other places your examples have no value for what we are discussing here.

But if they have no incoming links, aren't they also of no value? The only time they'll rank highly is if you search for what's essentially a unique term.

[Eliana Tamerin]

Search engines can't always be trusted to index sites equally, especially when their algorithms, for the most part, remain secret. The only ways to get better results is to trust the documentation the search engines publish, and then guess. Some experience can be relied upon, but even that can become null and void if the search engine decides to tweak their algorithms.

[stealth645]

If there is a thread which I REALLY want to have crawled, does it make sense to have another SEO friendlier page point to it?

For example, the page:

http://www.photoenthusiast.net/forum/index.php?topic=29.0 [nofollow]

Is also:

http://www.photoenthusiast.net/links/photo_challenge_1.php [nofollow]

I'm experimenting with this - both are in my sitemap now..

-Steve

[Eliana Tamerin]

Duplicate content can get you kicked out, so no, it's not smarter.

[stealth645]

...but the first URL isn't being read anyways.   

Duplicate data in the sitemap is bad?

[青山 素子]

If there is a thread which I REALLY want to have crawled, does it make sense to have another SEO friendlier page point to it?

Point to, not duplicate. It looks like you are duplicating, which can get your pages removed from the index completely.

Remember that Google considers pages with more links to have more importance than pages with few, so link to that topic where appropriate and include descriptive text in your link. Words in a URL are meaningless for SEO. The text of the link helps, especially if similar text is in the content on the page the link goes to.

[Eliana Tamerin]

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

[stealth645]

Here is a thread I brought up with Google, but I don't really understand what I can do about this...

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/4ae28627dc737ec4/5ad9c8fcd649447b#5ad9c8fcd649447b [nofollow]



I visited your forum with cookies disabled and javascript disabled
like googlebot does, and then clicj=ked on a link to one of the
posts.  The URL (spread over three lines here) was:

http://www.photoenthusiast.net/forum/index.php [nofollow]
?PHPSESSID=rbq3bpd4s9hrhd9qpq83k7vme0
&topic=188.msg1325#msg1325


Notice the PHP session ID -  you need to read the google webmaster
guidelines.


Specifically,


-- your software supplier  should not be using session IDs in any
URLs;


-- googlebot must be able to crawl without a cookie being set and with
session IDs being used;


-- even if google did allow sessionIDs, you would seems to be
generating a new URL for each page each time googlebot crawls and
hence  a huge/infinite number of URLs.


Maybe googlebot does attempt to discount the sessionID in the URLs but
I am not sure how well this works in practice.


Also several of the URLs in the google SERPS are the same content as
each other because you are displaying the same  "No Entry" type of
message because the visitor (the googlebot) was not logged in.   Pages
that can only be accessed by logging in should be excluded from google
indexing.


Robbo

[Ben_S]

Have him visit it with a googlebot useragent.

[stealth645]

My search friendly link is listed one day after I added it to the sitemap...

Google:    site:www.photoenthusiast.net

[青山 素子]

My search friendly link is listed one day after I added it to the sitemap...

Google:    site:www.photoenthusiast.net

That particular search type only shows a list of pages Google knows about, nothing more. Try searching for the title of the topic. Guess what won't show in the first 150 results?

Also, cut down on those meta keywords. Stick to 10 at most. Even though they don't help at all with the major engines, it doesn't mean they won't hurt by causing a penalty for stuffing that tag.

[SleePy]

I would like to point out that SMF will attempt to remove the php session id from guests it detects are robots.

Code (QueryString.php in SMF 2.0 Beta 3 Public) Select Expand


    // Do nothing if the session is cookied, or they are a crawler - guests are caught by redirectexit().  This doesn't work below PHP 4.3.0, because it makes the output buffer bigger.
    // !!! smflib
    if (empty($_COOKIE) && SID != '' && empty($context['browser']['possibly_robot']) && @version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '4.3.0') != -1)
        $buffer = preg_replace('/"' . preg_quote($scripturl, '/') . '(?!\?' . preg_quote(SID, '/') . ')(\?)?/', '"' . $scripturl . '?' . SID . '&', $buffer);


[stealth645]

Would having a Portal help?

I mean I could then have featured and recent posts which would get a PageRank based off the home page...

-Steve

[stealth645]

I'm not sure what happened in the past week, but now it seems my forum is getting crawled correctly (based on the sitemap):

site:www.photoenthusiast.net

Whoo hooo!

[redone]

There are mods around to shorted the urls and make them more seo friendly. We must remember not to confuse being ranked for a search term for being indexed.

Just google "what is repair_settings" for example. There is not too much science involved in ranking for search terms just lots of hard work and even more common sense.

[stealth645]

Ok - now my side is being crawled well by Google..

But it seems that all the "print page" versions of the page are also being indexed..

Is there something I can do about this?

-Steve

[青山 素子]

Use one of the many robots.txt suggestions in the community forums here.