Hello All, Hi guys, I'm new on the board, I took some time to read the post archives, and topics, however I haven't found any posts relating to my specific question. Maybe some of you can help me out here... Truth as I know it: 1. Highly posted to forums that are search engine friendly get crawled and indexed quite thoroughly. 2. Forum posts get ranked for key terms along with other web pages. 3. Forums add quality internal backlinks to your site and add to your site's overall Google PR and rankings under specific key terms. Background detail: My site has a forum running on it (in a sub-section of the site accessible from the index page and all through the site as well). We used to have our discussion forum as a seperate website, and running under a different forum script. We've since moved it to our main web property. when the discussion forum ran on a seperate domain we were getting all kinds of google backlinks simply from the posts that were being generated by the users in our forum at the time. Since we've moved it to our main site, we haven't been indexed by google (2 years) and no pages below the forum's index page shows up in the Google Site search. Facts (as I interpret them) 1. Google has not managed to index any pages below our discussion forum main page. 2. Our competitors are running similar discussion forums, also accessible through their main site as a sub-section, and they have been thoroughly indexed and "backlinked". 3. Our competitors show thousands of backlinks from their forum pages alone. We show 1. 4. Our forum has more topics, members, and threads than our competitors do. 5. We WERE being indexed before we moved the forum to our main site (under a sub-section). 6. Our rankings dropped for our main key terms at about the same time as we migrated the forum to it's new domain. 7. My site is highly ranked, and has a respectable PR of 5, regardless of our un-indexable forum pages. 8. Finally, I use PHPBB as my forum script, which I know can be indexed because plenty of forum sites are currently indexed running the same script as I am. Questions: 1. Is my drop in the serps related to my drop in backlinks? 2. Why do you think my new forum pages are not being indexed, but my old forum pages were being thoroughly indexed? 3. Is it better in terms of spiderability when the forum has its own domain versus being under a sub-section. 4. If the forum is more than 3 clicks deep into the site would it matter to the search engines in terms of indexing and spiderability? As far as I know Google can deep-crawl a site fairly well, given the right navigational structure. 5. What can I do to improve the spiderability of my forum? Thanks for your help in advance! This has been an elusive problem to resolve. -Sandro
PHPBB needs some modifications to be crawled in a good way, its not very seo friendly out of the box. Maybe if you post the link to your site we could help you more. was the old forum removed or is there a copy still on the old place? You could be facing a duplicate content penalty?
Read How do I optimize phpBB for search engines?. According to my tests, Google completely ignores links in web forums.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...www.video-game-rental.kalius.net+&btnG=Search I don't agree to that
I've found that Google picks up links in some web forums very quickly - in particular invisionboard and vbulletin seem to be monitored well. In my own experience, forums, because they change so quickly, seem to be crawled more regularly than static html pages! (In fact, I have one or two sites that are pretty new and the ONLY links Google has to them are from forum posts and/or personal profiles.)
Forum links are similar to site-wide links. Google treats them as one link (same anchor text and URL). It's not 100% ignored, you still get one link
Not from my tests... Disclaimer: I tested umm... about a year ago? Google changes constantly. Occassionally even for the better!
Absolutely. I joined DP 12-23-2004. The site linking from my sig was alexa ranked 4,500,000. It is now ranked 377,671. Google does not display these links when you use link: command but we know Google is showing less and less to us. Google works with it's own internal values, which are MUCH different than what we see .
I don't agree with that theory because I've verified a significant number of links to my sites from my signature here. G seems to love DP!
The life coach link in my sig here goes to a 'review my site' thread here with anchor text linking to my site. That review thread is in the top 200 for a search on 'life coach' simply from signature links.
Will I think part of the problem lies in the forums you selected. Why don't you try wih say hmmm DP? I'm preaty sure shawn have done some really sweet talking to the google spider, It loves signatures from DP.
I have had signature links on a number of forums going back 8 years but the only ones that show up in Google for me are Digital Point, my Forum - FreeHostTalk and one other, can't remember the name. Signature links do count, read this thread if you want proof http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=256
some forums wont show sigs to bots indexing, really depends on the site. They are a great marketing tool though...
Yeah, my photography forum doesn't show sigs to guests or bots... but most of them do, even if the value of those links are quite low.