Basil, you definitely have something interesting going on.
Interesting and troubling. I see a single Google bot all the time and it "says" it is reading posts, but they don't seem to actually be indexing. Well, now we know ther eis "something" going on, now the trick will be to figure out exactly what!
You still have all of the old links in google from your 6.5 forum. You have a bunch of links to the new forum as far as to the general forum listing and the individual postlist pages. But you don't appear to have many new links to the new showflat script. What we usually see is the old links eventually go away and google reindexes your new ones. For some reason, they are keeping all of your old links in the system.
Right, that's what I've been saying. It is indexing "part" of my site, but not the main parts. I am wondering if having the re-director to the old threads could be part of the problem? Should I get rid of that at some point on the theory that Google will then evantually drop the old links and re-index the new? Just a thought.
For example, do this:
site:britishcarforum.com +ubb/postlist
You'll see it has a bunch of links to individual postlist pages. But if you do this:
site:britishcarforum.com +ubb/showflat
You'll see that there aren't many listed at all.
Even using the site:britishcarforum.com +ubb/postlist there were only 153 that cam eup for me (only 20 the other search for showflat). Clearly I have a problem.
Your site appears to be the only one with this problem. Everyone else that has posted has many many links to the new showflat.
Lucky me. When I do YOUR site with the showflat seach above, I get just over 12,000 results (but you have over 26,000 topics!!) But that is clearly better than the 20 results that I get for my site.
I can search for distinct subjects from their site and they are listed in Google. Yours I cannot however. I'm not sure if your site is being penalized for something, or what. I know you had made the change to/from search engine friendly not too long ago, so not sure if it's related.
That change was only temporary and only because I was desperate for Google to index my site. Ok, so not all are having this issue, so now I have to figure out what is different from my site than everyone elses. One thing that is also different for me besides the new Threads 7, is that I moved to a dedicated server and am using a server management service to monitor things, install security, etc. Now I am wondering is maybe something about my server set up could be preventing google from crawling my site? For example, when I recently installed a wiki on my site, I found that I could not save any edited pages - I would get "Forbidden You don't have access..." Well, I finally figured out that if I disabled ssomething called mod_secure - an Apachie security thingy, then my wiki worked right. Now I only disabled it for the wiki directory, not my entire root directory, so I'm wondering if maybe something like that might be at issue with Google? I know I'm grasping at straws, but I don't have anything else to grasp at right now.
Or could there be a difference in my PhP setup?
Basil
