Thumbs up for search engine optimization

innerfire · January 13, 2004, 06:23:55 PM

I just wanted to give you guys a huge thumbs up for getting this site optimized for search engines. It is the best I have seen. It looks like almost all posts are being picked up. That is a major benefit! I may have to switch over soon. I have been looking for a board to upgrade from yabb 1 that will be able to index well. My board at
http://www.skyeherbals.com does not even index the index page which is a bummer as I am trying to nail down some key words for placement with google and the links would help (not to mention the content as Milk Thistle Extract is my target keyword and I have a lot of articles on the herb). I may have to switch over soon. Do you have support for upgrading from Yabb 1 Gold SP 1.3

Jeff Lewis · January 13, 2004, 06:49:54 PM

Best course would be to upgrade to YaBB SE and then SMF I would think.

[Unknown] · January 13, 2004, 08:01:48 PM

(although there are nasty bugs in that converter from my experience, like modifiedName and ID_MSG order.)

-[Unknown]

Fizzy · January 14, 2004, 05:09:18 AM

Innerfire,

I'd certainlly agree with that "thumbs up".

The guys here have done a terrific job of it. If it wasn't for Unknown I wouldn't have half the members I do have on my home forum. If yours is a busy Yabb1 then when you convert you can expect Googlebot to be breaking in every couple of days.

It makes the world of difference

Slack · January 14, 2004, 03:36:34 PM

Pardon a noobs questions - but how can you tell that the Googlebot is visiting your site and how do you know it is picking up nearly every message?

Thanks!

pulpitfire · January 14, 2004, 04:19:06 PM

Quote from: Slack on January 14, 2004, 03:36:34 PM
Pardon a noobs questions - but how can you tell that the Googlebot is visiting your site and how do you know it is picking up nearly every message?

Thanks!

just view your forum access log in Admin, and look for something like:

http://www.WISEnutbot.com (45)
or
http://www.googlebot.com (345)

the number in parenthesis is how many links they checked. compare that to how many articles you have in your forum. if it's close, they indexed most of your threads.

Also, they don't always do a full index every time they check your site. sometimes they just do a quick scan. it could take up to a month to see if you get a full indexing.

Slack · January 14, 2004, 05:47:47 PM

Thanks Pege!

Ben_S · January 14, 2004, 05:56:36 PM

Of course in smf there isnt an access log thingy as it was a pain

Slack · January 14, 2004, 05:59:20 PM

Hmm, that's right, I just went and looked.

So... ??

[Unknown] · January 14, 2004, 06:15:14 PM

You can look in Who's Online, but that currently doesn't show user agents. (actually, that's something I added here

.)

I should be able to explain how to do it, however, in the Charter Member boards - just ask.

-[Unknown]

Slack · January 14, 2004, 06:18:40 PM

Thanks, will do.

Jeff Lewis · January 14, 2004, 07:01:41 PM

Very cool, just converted one of my forums yesterday and already it's being crawled

RoCKeT-88 · January 14, 2004, 07:02:08 PM

Quote from: Slack on January 14, 2004, 03:36:34 PM
Pardon a noobs questions - but how can you tell that the Googlebot is visiting your site and how do you know it is picking up nearly every message?

Thanks!

type this is in google search allinurl:www.yourdomain.com and will it list every page google has indexed.

Anguz · January 15, 2004, 01:34:30 AM

Quote from: `Z0mB|e` on January 14, 2004, 07:02:08 PM
type this is in google search allinurl:www.yourdomain.com and will it list every page google has indexed.

that's an awesome tip! I didn't know that

* Anguz goes check the number of results for his url, although it's temporarily offline

innerfire · January 15, 2004, 02:32:10 AM

Before you go to check google will the "allinurl:", you should know that while they are going through their systems integration your results will be all wacky. Right now when I searched my site it showed 5 pages. When I looked last night it showed 19, and most of them were cached last november and have not yet been updated with the newest pages. It has been a major issue for me as I am trying to get my product line to the world and google takes around 3 months from first index until it is indexed on every server they run. -Mark

Fizzy · January 15, 2004, 08:14:21 AM

Caching I would have thought was good to see.
Not ever page in the forum would get crawled anyway, at least by having a cache there is a record of it, if it gets updated and moves back to the top of the forum board then it shoudl get refreshed on the next index ...

.... I think

RoCKeT-88 · January 15, 2004, 08:28:55 AM

Quote from: innerfire on January 15, 2004, 02:32:10 AM
Before you go to check google will the "allinurl:", you should know that while they are going through their systems integration your results will be all wacky. Right now when I searched my site it showed 5 pages. When I looked last night it showed 19, and most of them were cached last november and have not yet been updated with the newest pages. It has been a major issue for me as I am trying to get my product line to the world and google takes around 3 months from first index until it is indexed on every server they run. -Mark

Well you just have to make google bot crawl your site more. Google will crawl your site more if the content changes often. So even if there are no real changes, reword things every so often, it does not take much for google bot to see if the content has changed. Other words keep two or three copies of the main index switching between them every other week or so. It is exetremely important to continue to get back links to your site. The more back links you continue to get the more google will crawl. I can get google to crawl almost daily. Google will at various times use different data bases so at various times google will show older data bases specailly if your failing to get google to crawl your site. Google should if your doing things to get crawled do 1 deep crawl of your site once a month. The main index should be crawled and updated almost daily. Its fairly easy to get google to crawl your site.

Quote from: Fizzy on January 15, 2004, 08:14:21 AM
Caching I would have thought was good to see.
Not ever page in the forum would get crawled anyway, at least by having a cache there is a record of it, if it gets updated and moves back to the top of the forum board then it shoudl get refreshed on the next index ...

.... I think

Caching is a very good thing. Most of the site at any given point will be cached. Google for the most part only deep crawls about every 3-5 weeks give or take.

Quote from: Anguz on January 15, 2004, 01:34:30 AM
Quote from: `Z0mB|e` on January 14, 2004, 07:02:08 PM
type this is in google search allinurl:www.yourdomain.com and will it list every page google has indexed.

that's an awesome tip! I didn't know that

* Anguz goes check the number of results for his url, although it's temporarily offline

Dont know if this one has been posted or not. It has no real purpose but type this in google search elgoog and hit Im feeling lucky.

innerfire · January 16, 2004, 02:35:26 AM

Are there any modifications to this forum that are not on SMF 1.0 Beta -3.1415 general release for search engine optimization?

[Unknown] · January 16, 2004, 02:48:50 AM

Yes, but they will be in the next release...

-[Unknown]

innerfire · January 16, 2004, 03:06:27 AM

Should I wait to make my site available to the public until then if my main goal is to get good listings from the get go. I want googlebot to eat up the content.

I don't want to mess up the conversion by making too many mods, but if they are easy to find in threads here, I would love to get my site up this weekend. (BTW thank you for the little MySQL change. It worked like a charm). -M

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Thumbs up for search engine optimization