SMF SEO Unfriendly?

[stealth645]

Ok thanks - I did list the site on some free directories...  Figured it couldn't hurt...

[chadon]

Why avoid link directories?  I've submitted to few...

I did submit to link directories a while ago and it did increase the traffic on my websites. Getting extra backlinks is always good but all directories are not equal. The worse that could happen is doing extra work for nothing in return. If you have some extra time to use go ahead, it might not be worth to do it but you could get some benefit. I personally hate doing this kind of work but i have nothing against that idea.

[karlbenson]

I won't disagree a couple won't be bad.
But if most of your backlinks come from directories, then google might start to think something is 'fishy'.

Alot would depends on the editorial requirements of the site.
(whether they reject any)

[chadon]

 It might be true for the pagerank but we are talking about traffic and they are not related. One of my websites had a pagerank drop from 6 to 3 and the traffic has never been better since.
If some backlinks could harm a website it would be too easy to destroy a competitive website and I am sure search engines developers thought about that.

[Ben_S]

If anything, directories do sweet fa for SEO because their links to your site are through a redirect system that doesn't pass on any page rank. Generally, robots won't follow them.

[LT07]

I never used SEO4SMF and I got my site on google in a little over a week. But thats because I cheated and put a link to my site in the copyright of another site I administrate So all the crawlers found a new link.
By that time though I had thought a lot about my content, I had prepared my main pages to get rid of the junk and show the content.
My site and forums are googled very well (and get way more yahoo crawlers though). But being a small site with little activity or content, it does fine in search results.

Hmmmm this is how your forum is indexed in google and its just like every other smf forum I've seen, all the pointless pages are indexed but NO post content.

Has anybody actualy seen a smf forum indexed by google?

[LT07]

As a matter of fact there are many people in this thread claiming their forums are being indexed in google, well I've managed to track down many of your forums and so far not one of you giving advice has had your forum indexed properly, having users profiles forum stats and log in pages in goole is no good, you need google to index the post content.

I'm sorry but as far as SMF forums being indexed by search engines goes they are a disaster.

[LT07]

  It worked  Only the duplicate pages have the "noindex" tag. Now I understand why my SMF forum was so SEO Unfriendly and I retire what I said previously.
Thank you very very much Motoko-chan. You saved my site 

Two more questions:
I guess there is no need to display the last 10 topics on the SEO point of vue if they are not being indexed. Right?
If the pages are not indexed, does it mean that search engines won't follow the links in those pages?
Thank you again.

Again
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Amustangv8.com%2Fforum%2F&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

This is NOT being indexed.

What is wrong with you people, don't you know what an indexed forum should look like?

[LT07]

@Motoko-chan

for all the advice your giving your own forum is NOT indexed in goole

[chadon]

Again
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Amustangv8.com%2Fforum%2F&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

This is NOT being indexed.

What is wrong with you people, don't you know what an indexed forum should look like?

I don't know what you are talking about but that Google search returns 16.700 pages on my side. I agree the first results are not the best pages but I recently added a few nofollow links for the ones I don't want to be indexed and the profile ones will stay indexed. That's my choice.

[LT07]

Again
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Amustangv8.com%2Fforum%2F&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

This is NOT being indexed.

What is wrong with you people, don't you know what an indexed forum should look like?

I don't know what you are talking about but that Google search returns 16.700 pages on my side. I agree the first results are not the best pages but I recently added a few nofollow links for the ones I don't want to be indexed and the profile ones will stay indexed. That's my choice.

My apologies google HAS indexed some your post content!

to see what I'm talking about search google for "SMF 1.1.5"
open a new google search page

the links you found using "SMF 1.1.5" strip the URL's down to "subdomain.domainname.tld/DirPath/"

eg http://www.mysite.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8657 is reduced to "mysite.com/forum/"

in the other google window use "site:somesite.com/forum/" and look at the search results

google indexes (readily) all SMF links that have "index.php?action=" in them, mostly help pages forum stats profiles etc etc but only a tiny percentage of post contents are indexed.

Most forums the only thing that goole has indexed are the pages with "index.php?action=" in the url.

SMF has some nasty code that actively stops spiders from indexing its pages, the proof is in google itself

*edit* why are your forum links diferent to everybody elses??
you don't have url's like "topic,25.0.html"

[chadon]

 There is some good posts around here explaining how to prevent useless pages from being indexed y search engines and I applied them on my forum so it should be better in a while.
If I was able to do this (I am far from being a pro) why can't the developers do the same to the default configuration?
I agree with LT07, what is the point to have the help pages open to search engines? How many duplicate content is indexed by them from thousands of forums?
More duplicate content is indexed with the profile pages when their access is blocked to the guests. A redirection to the login page would fix the problem.
I think this is a very bad SEO problem and you can't expect to have all SMF users to do the mods for something so important.


*Edit*

*edit* why are your forum links diferent to everybody elses??
you don't have url's like "topic,25.0.html"

I have the pretty url mod. Some moderators said it's useless in this topic but I personally think it's a great feature.

[LT07]

Now that I'm aware of the problem and have been searching google its apparent smf has had this problem for the past couple of years and doesn't seem anywhere close to fixing it, V2 behaves just the same. This is a serious bug and should have been one of their top priorities to fix, as a matter of fact its so bad at being indexed smf could sell their code so websites that don't want to be indexed.

Me thinks its time to look for another forum

[Dannii]

Again
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Amustangv8.com%2Fforum%2F&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

This is NOT being indexed.

What is wrong with you people, don't you know what an indexed forum should look like?

I don't know what you're talking about. It looks indexed to me.

I agree with LT07, what is the point to have the help pages open to search engines?
More duplicate content is indexed with the profile pages when their access is blocked to the guests. A redirection to the login page would fix the problem.

The help pages are noindexed in 2.0 now I think. Same for the profile pages, and any with permission errors.

[青山 素子]

@Motoko-chan
for all the advice your giving your own forum is NOT indexed in goole

Yeah, it looks like I was blocking all pages except the default. Considering how little traffic my main forum gets, it isn't all that big of a deal for me.

At least one of the forums I manage has actual content indexed just fine, although I see a few things I need to block to clean up the results a bit more.

There is some good posts around here explaining how to prevent useless pages from being indexed y search engines and I applied them on my forum so it should be better in a while.
If I was able to do this (I am far from being a pro) why can't the developers do the same to the default configuration?

SMF 1.1.x will likely never have any further adjustments to stuff like noindex markers and the like because it is feature-frozen. Disruptive changes will likely not be made unless there is a big bug or a security issue that requires it. There will be changes coming in 2.0 (and lots of work has been done to work on how to indicate what to index and what not to).

[chadon]

 I never thought about the help pages being indexed as duplicate content until LT07 brought it up but that seems like a major bug. The version 1.1.5 was offered to fix bugs why can't the same be done for that?
I am sure this problem has been talked about before so why hasn't anything be done since the past years?

[Dannii]

Fixing the indexing logic isn't worth risking the stability of 1.1. You can do it yourself, or wait for 2.0. Using robots.txt is significantly easier than a noindex meta rule if you do want to fix it yourself.

[chadon]

 I don't see what a few nofollow or noindex tags have to do with the stability of the software but yes, we can do it ourself. The problem is that not all users know about this problem  or have the ability to do that.
I don't see any announcement or sticky about it and a minimum should be to display a robots.txt sample in the admin section or during the install process.

[LT07]

Again
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Amustangv8.com%2Fforum%2F&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

This is NOT being indexed.

What is wrong with you people, don't you know what an indexed forum should look like?

I don't know what you're talking about. It looks indexed to me.

I agree with LT07, what is the point to have the help pages open to search engines?
More duplicate content is indexed with the profile pages when their access is blocked to the guests. A redirection to the login page would fix the problem.

The help pages are noindexed in 2.0 now I think. Same for the profile pages, and any with permission errors.

Actually as I already pointed out that forum does have some "post content" indexed but its wildly disproportionate to all the forum "index lists", if you've ever used any other forums, guest books you should recognize by looking at the content google is indexing in smf that its all wrong.

RE V2, I'm using it also and still the same problem.

[青山 素子]

RE V2, I'm using it also and still the same problem.

I believe most of the updates aren't in a public release yet.