Hi, I am using a firefox add-on SEO tool called SEO doctor, which check each page of your site just by one click. So, I used it in my site and no matter which ever thread I click it says it is not index-able. My homepage, articles and blogs section is index-able but not thread. If I see all threads it says its index-able but when I click on thread to see all posts, it says not index-able. I have attached a screen shot that shows the result. The tool says "page is not indexable because it has conical URL set ...." I did google search and found this "Suggestion: Remove noindex from category pages when it can be used for siloing highly related content." Can someone please advice me how to solve this issue? Thanks
I cannot read your screenshot clearly, but I would check your robots.txt file to make sure you are not blocking any pages or sections and make sure you do not have a noindex meta tag on your pages.
yes that right. Please check the screen hot from this link:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21926200/Temp shot.JPG Thanks
It looks like this is the URL in question in your screenshot: http://www.marvelousforums.com/need-advice/15.htm?pagenumber= I am not sure how to navigate to it, but the issue appears to be that you have a canonical meta tag set to <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.marvelousforums.com/need-advice/15.htm" /> which is different then the actual URL of the page (notice the query string portion of it '?pagenumber=') - http://www.marvelousforums.com/need-advice/15.htm?pagenumber= This is working properly though because if you look at the page you are on it shows the same content as the one in the canonical URL, the only difference is the query string, so you do not want the search engines to see them as 2 different pages with the same content, and the canonical tag tells the search engine to ignore this page and look at the one in the tag which is what you want. This URl displays the same content http://www.marvelousforums.com/need-advice/15.htm?pagenumber= as this URL http://www.marvelousforums.com/need-advice/15.htm which is why the page is using a canonical tag. So you do not want this page to be indexable. Hopefully that helps answer your question.
So, that mean I am good? Also I tried the same tool on other site and no one seems to have the same problem which I have. I know it has something to do with vBSEO but I checked vBSEO sites too and they all says page indexable. That's not the only URL, it says not indexable on each post in my forum
It says not indexable on all posts on my forums. Here is one: http://www.marvelousforums.com/security/7.htm#post67 Thanks for your help
For the forum URL you posted, there is also an issue with canonical tag. The URL you posted is 'http://www.marvelousforums.com/security/7.htm#post67' and the URL in the canonical tag is 'http://www.marvelousforums.com/security/7.htm?pagenumber=' (notice the second URL has a query string in it, and the first URL does not) - so in this case the URL 'http://www.marvelousforums.com/security/7.htm?pagenumber=' is getting credit for this page. I am not sure if this is what you want, but personally I would prefer to have the canonical URL not have the query string in it, so I would make the canonical URL be 'http://www.marvelousforums.com/security/7.htm'. This might or might not be an easy change to make and it is probably setup this way for paginated forum posts. If the forum thread had multiple pages then you would want the paginated pages canonical tag to include the 'pagenumber' portion of the query string so the paginated pages received credit and all of the credit was not just flowing to the first page of the forum post. Some people might want only the first page of a forum post to receive all of the credit, but if that was the case then you would not be able to have any of your paginated forum post pages rank. The difference in URLs between the one posted and the one in the canonical tag is the reason why you are having a non-indexable issue. As an aside, the URLs 'http://www.marvelousforums.com/security/7.htm#post67' and 'http://www.marvelousforums.com/security/7.htm' are seen as the same in Google's eyes. Google does not view anything after the pound sign (#) as a different URL since it is an in page link anchor.
Thanks for your help Revium. Can you suggest me how to resolve this issue. I am still thinking it has something to do with vBSEO. Please help with me resolve this issue Thanks
I am not familiar enough with vBulletin to be able to tell you how to solve the issue, but I would guess there are probably some settings in the administrative section that have to do with setting the canonical tag. You could also try searching for 'vBulletin canonical settings' in a search engine and you will probably find some answers. From what I have seen so far, your site should be getting indexed right now, the only change I would look to make would be to change the URL in the canonical tag of the first page of a forum thread. The canonical tag on the secondary/paginated pages of forum threads are probably fine. I would try and remove the 'pagenumber' portion of the canonical tag on the first page, but if you cannot easily do that, then I would not worry about it, it should not affect you much since there is a canonical tag on the page so you will not suffer from duplicate content.
Hello , I have checked your robots.txt file there is your sitemap.xml . Now you have need to remove it only. Thanks
Removed, but that's not the cause of this problem because I added my sitemap in robots.txt after I saw pages are not indexing. Something else is causing this problem and I am not sure how to fix it.
Not sure if it helps but I am posting the contents of my .htaccess file, maybe it has somwthing to do with it ...