UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Suggestions and Feedback Google still not there

I know this has been discussed, but I thought by now I would see some improvement, but I have not. Ever since I changed from Threads 6.5 to 7.X, my Google presence has GREATLY decreased. I have been running 7.X since December and when I Google certain words that I KNOW are in threads all over my site, I get no threads. I tried Google's advanced search to set the domain to only look for those words on my domain - Well, I find that hardly any of my actual threads are indexed in Google. Lots of other pages from my site, such as pp-classified pages, etc., but almost no actual links to threads! My new member rate has dropped dramatically as well! I used to get 7-8 new members per day from Google now I'm lucky if I get 1 or 2 from Google per week. Has anyone figured out what the heck is going on with Google not crawling the actual threads? This is starting to worry me a LOT! It was NOT like this until I "upgraded". I love Threads 7, but man, I have GOT to figure out why Google no longer likes my site.

For example, the phrase "Has anyone here tried Electrolytic Rust Removal" is in a thread that was posted way back in January. I would have thought that if I Googled that exact phrase, It would show up with a link to the thread that contains that phrase. But it returns NO results. I am beginning to thing I may have to move to another forum product - but what?


Basil

i too, think this is a matter of great importance. google is most certainly indexing my site -- it's always listed in the spiders section of who's online -- but it seems not to be picking up many threads.

this matter is now complicated for me personally because it seems my server cannot support spider-friendly URLs.

now, i'm not about to fly off into a huff and drop UBB ... i've got far too much invested in it now. but it would be reassuring to know that this issue was being taken seriously, and that plans were in place to try and address the problem.

i'm not completely convinced that site maps are the answer. or at least, the complete answer. though if someone wants to provide some compelling evidence that they work with UBB, i'll be all ears

I MUST fix this. Something drastic has changed since I switched to Threads 7 and I urge Rick and anyone else involved to PLEASE take this issue very seriously. There is no reason for almost none of my actual threads to be indexed unless there is something fundamentally broken. My forum growth has slowed to a crawl and it used to be growing like gang-busters! There is something about this new Threads that Google does NOT like - and we as a community need to figure out what it is and FIX it.

Basil

I will support your cause, but i'm sure that Googles moving the goal posts at the same time.

I read that they will no longer spider a search result
from a forum, from a 3rd hand not an official source.

I have no idea how google works to be honnest,
ive always been there, but since the switch i dont
see the high numbers on a search result either.

I'm testing a site map at the moment, but its only
been running for 10 days.

Google says that it has "9,000" URL's
But if i do a site name search it come back with 200.

Yahoo is about the same in numbers too,
but since i forwarded the site map to yahoo, ive had
about 30ish spiders everyday most of the time?

So i'm hoping that after 30days or so Google and Yahoo
results will be alot better.

Still puzzels me why Goggle / Yahoo site maps show 9000 urls
but a search will only show 200 urls ??

I'm watching these topics with great interest.

I have a fairly decent ammount of data in google, Example. Though I am using the sitemap addon, by me

And that's what i'm waiting to kick in or Not?
But i do want to wait to see if it has made a diffrence,
if google search lists the urls the site map has
in a search then i will be very happy.

But in such a short time, its not fair to
say either way. 1,2,3 months is a decent review time scale.

I do have high hopes for it

i just used a similar test for my site

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.jakchat.com

and got over 8900 entries. My board has about 46000 posts at the moment, so i reckon this should be about right. (i'm not using a sitemap. yet.)

my default posts per page is 25, if this makes any difference.

some of these entries were for user profiles (which should not actually be visible in any case) and other non-message content.

strangely, however, not all the content can be found. even content a few months old sometimes does not turn up in the google index.

Mark, the change won't be noticeable immedaitely, likely after a month you'll see things start to get larger (keep in mind the sitemap is to ultimately shove their discovery bot to the side, and tell their crawling bot where exactly to look, so once it gets started it'll work well).

BTW, my rankings are only from 2 months of the sitemap (as I made it, dun dun dun, 2 months ago lol).

Something I noticed is that my one google bot is actually Google-AdSense and not plane old google.

I think Gizmo - what people are saying is that why should they have to spend $50 on a sitemap - personally I would if there was a way for it to list all non-threads pages that included a threads template and threads script page.

I have not checked my google listings recently, so do not know if it has gone up at all - but if my single bot is connected with the Adsense that I have on my site and not anything to do with the google database then it is not working for me.

Maybe google have moved the goalposts - but then why are some sites better than others.

For me, my listings in the UK Google is diabolical - this may be due to an unrelated matter - but it is a concern for me.

If I do site:fansfocus.com on google.co.uk - I get a big fat zero! I would love to know why??

That is intresting (Horrifiying) the zero results via .co.uk

Strangly I have 1 Google Spider / Bot there all the time
when ever i look at the who's on line.

I think he has the same IP 66.249.66.38 but unsure.
I dont have any Adsense on my site. No adds at all.

Some weired crap going on ?

JUst as an experiment, I went back to Decmember to this thread:

https://www.ubbcentral.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/170575/page/17#Post170575

And I copied a random phrase exactly from this thread:

"have the link carry the date/time tag"

Then I Googled that phrase and got not results. I tried this on my site with all manner of random phrases from different posts made since the move and NONE of the phrases were returned in Google. Conclusion: Google is not indexing my site threads at all! Now we need to figure out why! If Google chnaged the way they spider, then they did it at the exact same time that I switched to T7.

Basil

It has been said that google has changed the way they crawl sites now with only one bot. Have you contacted google about this? Google is crawling my site all the time.

It seems there's a bit of mass hysteria going on. Some of the numbers being thrown around here are just wrong. For example, Ian. You said you have 0 links in google.co.uk. Follow this link:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:fansfocus.com&hl=en&start=60&sa=N

That sure doesn't look like a big fat zero to me. It's showing something like 71,000 results, and the link above is directly to a page that has links to your forum in the database.

I've mentioned this in a previous post as well. Basil, one of the important things is back links to your site. The more links you have pointing back to your site, the more thoroughly it will be indexed.

For example, we have many back links pointing here. Do a search for "UBB.threads 7.1 Released" you'll see that it's been indexed.

Or search for this one. "Question on alignment property on the registration screen." Gizmo posted that on the 8th, and it's already in google.

Or use ubbdev.com. Search for "UBBDev News - February 2007". This was posted on Feb 22, and is indexed.

Google my personal site. It's very small, site:rb69.com The only links that point to that site are here in my signature. That's it. I've never submitted the site to google or any other search engine for that matter. They have 89 pages indexed. As small as my site is, that's pretty much my entire site.

We run a totally stock board. I don't do anything special here. We don't have a sitemap, no robots.txt, and google is obviously indexing this site. If there is some problem with what we're doing that google doesn't like, then it sure would seem like we'd be suffering from the same issues.

I do take all problems seriously, and if there is an issue, I always work on trying to fix it. I just don't see what I can do on this one. We're using the same style urls we were using in 6.5.5, and the same format to process them with search engine friendly ones.

KuKu, yours seems to be picking up ok in Google as well. For example, do this search:

site:jakchat.com +showflat

Links to about 6,600 pages of showflat. The very first one is to a post made on the 9th of this month. The second is to a post made on the 8th.

1. Dont Shoot me as i probably done what Ian Done Living in the UK.
2. You sure you wont shoot me?

Ok

Following your link Rick i also see all of those links.
And in the Google Search criteria it has the option
underneath for web or co.uk.

So if i tick .co.uk. as the search criteria i get a fat zero.

Its probably a google thing and also a Location thing,
this is the url from the uk results i get zero.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Afansfocus.com&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB

Dont Shoot me.

Just sharing information. I'm not a trouble maker

For me personally its too early to moan about results.
But i do find this topic very intresting.

Nope, I appreciate it Mark. Didn't see that option. But, now do this. Change the search terms to something else.

site:ubbcentral.com = 0 links
site:ubbdev.com = 0 links

Uhoh, must be a problem with UBB.threads?

Hmm:

site:vbulletin.com = 2 links, and neither of them are actual vbulletin pages.

site:phpbb.com = 0 links.

So, I'm not an expert on google.co.uk, so that seems like something not just related to UBB.threads.

Ok, so maybe it's just a uk thing and it will only show domains that end in .uk? Not sure. If that's not the case, and it was indexing them before, then it would seem Ian would at least have some old links in there.

Edit:

And that surely seems to be the case. On that same page, do this:

site:www.theregister.co.uk = 141,00 links
site:www.theregister.com = 0 links

Same site, different top level domain. Since Ian's domain ends in .com and not .co.uk, that's probably why he has 0 links.

What I'm getting at basically by my original statement, of mass hysteria, is some things get said that people feed off of, but doing a bit of investigation shows that it's not really something related to UBB.threads.

I will add a bit of advice here as well. Some people see a lower ranking so they start to panic and they go changing variables. What I mean is this scenario:

Uhoh, my google ranking is down. I better change something. Hmm, let's try search engine friendly URLs. 2 weeks later, it hasn't improved. Let's change it back to non-search engine friendly URLs.

See a problem with the above? When you make those changes it's like moving your site again. Your URLs are totally changed, so that's like starting all over again. I imagine, if you switch, and then switch back and keep fiddling, you'd probably get penalized as your URLs are changing very frequently, and this affects all of your URLs to the forum as well.

I'm more confused now (with my tests)
As ive been playing and its really strange what's happening?

yahoo.co.uk
site:ubbcentral.com
Pages (286,024) | Inlinks (33)

yahoo.co.uk
site:fansfocus.com
Pages (1,032,274) | Inlinks (1)

Both of these are searched from yahoo.co.uk
But the results come from a yahoo.com

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/siteexplorer/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Ffansfocus.com&bwm=p&bwms=p&fr=yfp-t-501&fr2=seo-rd-se

Somthing is a miss with Google ?

Mark, as for your particular site. Did you make any changes to the URL or something. You have some very weird results in Google, and it's probably confusing them to say the least. I know you actually run under wikwirral.co.uk, however google is also indexing your site as cruisewirral.com. Now the problem is this.

Do this: site:cruisewirral.com +showflat

Now when you click on any of your search results you get sent to a page like this:

http://www.wikiwirral.co.uk/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubbthreads.php/ubb/cfrm

So it's being redirected, but that redirect link is bad. You have a couple thousand links in google under cruisewirral.com and they all end up just linking to the main forum page since it appears you have a bad redirect. I imagine Google would end up penalizing a site for that since they all just look like they are pointing to the same page.

I switched domains about 10 days ago.
So cruisewirral.com has a forwarder inplace to redirect anyone
to the new forum location.

cruisewirral.com/forums
will send them to the new location..

I'm not beating anyone up at the moment as i know it
can take a good month or so for google to pick things up.

At the same time of the switch i also enabled spider friendly urls and opened up the forums to guests too.


I'm just try to help anyone to see it from a .co.uk view
and Google

It looks like your redirect is messed up then Mark. You have one to many ubbthreads.php's in there:

http://www.wikiwirral.co.uk/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubbthreads.php/ubb/cfrm

That should be:

http://www.wikiwirral.co.uk/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/cfrm

Like I said. Big changes like this will really hurt your ranking, as all this time Google now thinks all of those old links are just duplicate content.

Ian. It looks like you're up to about 154,000 links to showflat in Google. I'm pretty sure that's quite a bit higher than the last time I looked at it.

Very first post in the results was one made on the 18th of this month.

Err hang on,
yes i put the redirect file on the ubbthreads.php

And i also have a domain reditect?
Which is enabled via my server control pannel.

I will go and double check them as you have spotted somthing
that could effect my numbers.

Yeah, so basically what's happening is even if I go to a link to an actual post in Google. It's going to ubbthreads.php/ubbthreads.php/ubb=blah. Since that's not a valid link it just redirects to the main front page. So, all of your cruisewirral google links that point to individual posts are just going to the main page.

I enabled bots to crawl about 30 days ago. Google has been crawling and have indexed 9,000 posts already. I would say that it is working.

Okay i only have the ubbthreads.php (redirect)
No Re-directer via server inplace now. - must have removed it last week.

I check the cached links on google and there pre - move.
Or when i had both active.

Any cruisewirral links are dead now anyway,
they are on a new url

Well, it's not your old classic redirector. It's the current one. Example, you have this link in Google:

www.cruisewirral.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/29895/page/29

That is actually ending up at:

http://www.wikiwirral.co.uk/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubbthreads.php/ubb/cfrm

So, it would appear that your server redirect or something is not setup properly.

Confused now?

The only redirect i have in place, is the one in the ubbthreads.php

And the contents of that i have posted above your last post?
I dont know why its doubling?

should i loose the ubbthreads.php

$URL = "http://www.wikiwirral.co.uk/forums/ubbthreads.php";

to

$URL = "http://www.wikiwirral.co.uk/forums/";

??

Thanks Rick.

As Mark said, I went to www.google.co.uk and entered site:fansfocus.com and selected the .co.uk option.

Maybe it is listing only those sites hosted in the UK (mine is US hosted) - but then site:yahoo.com brings up a lot of sites.

I do not pretend to know google - I am not saying it is the fault of threads at all.

My only concern is that I get as many pages as possible listed on google and compete with other sites.

My apologies if I added to any hysteria - not my intention

$URL = "http://www.wikiwirral.co.uk/forums";

That's what i should have, cheers rick
Well spotted (Thanks)...

Now back to the Google debate lol

May be as a community / group we should try and find out whats going on with "Local" Goggles?

What's changed and is there a way around it?

No worries Ian. I just try and make sure that we can isolate actual issues that might be related to threads. Some people will come and read posts and just see "0 links in google" and automatically jump to assumptions and then it just compounds things.

it is zero

UK Zero ??

(Pissst i want 2 more posts for 1,000 )

Well, it is zero, but it's unrelated to UBB.threads. I'm just trying to make sure that people following along know and don't just assume that it's a threads issue.

Got yu

Does anyone have any "connections" with anyone who works at Google that they might ask if Google has changed and if so, what can we do about it?

How Google crawls my site

I dont have time "Right Now" but you may want to sumerise
and juicey bits