Google is eating my forums!

Well...with problems from phpbb I tried Punbb with decent success. Google has basically shafted many of our forums. My phpbb sites like pspforums.com, 360forum.com, and finalfantasyforum.com are just not being indexed or cached no matter what I try.

So I started DemocracyForums.com using mybb which looked rather promising. I beta'd around March 1st. About March 18th I started promoting it heavily. Within a few days the big G came to take a peek. I saw about 12 pages the next day. Over the next week I saw a daily increase in CACHED and INDEXED pages. The past 2 days I started to see visits for the SERPs. wOOt! SUCCESS!

Today I take a peek.. 9910 pages are now indexed at Google! I am very pleased now and all my new forums will be using mybb. I thought I would share the news.

btw-the mybb I installed without ANY modifications other than template related. Mybb validates xhtml.

 

GJ, I see 9960 indexed...486 unique then supplemental, but still great results after less than a month!

 

Dude...it's like 10 days.

wow...it says 15,100 now!

 

This morning it's 19,700 and from what I see much of this is cached and NOT supplemental.

 

you can have all the pages indexed if you use a sitemap

 

I tried sitemap before on a few sites and the results were terrible.

 

Yes, phpbb is known to be terrible for SEO. Congratulations on being indexed with mybb.

 

22k pages today..it's simply incredible.

 

Yes, NICE job, I am seeing google index a whole lot more of content sites these days

 

Probably just a coincidence, Google has been trying to index larger sites better in the last couple weeks. The only thing PunBB has that phpBB doesn't when it comes to indexability is PunBB doesn't serve sessions to guests. A change of a few lines of code in phpBB and it won't either.

A quick look at your PSP forums, for example, and I can see the potential problem. Your rss feeds are giving different url's for your posts, possibly causing duplicant content issues. Also, your submitting a sitemap to google that only lists your forums, and not your posts. Maybe G is reading that and only indexing what's in your sitemap. Just a thought, you never know. I'd solve those two problems and see where it takes you.

You should also remove the PSP Forums before every thread title, giving every page nearly the same title may cause G to stick them in supplemental or not even index them. You can do this easily in viewtopic.tpl ...

 

Hmm...thanks for the comments. I think you are right about the RSS feeds. I think I will modify them for registered user display only.

 

Excellent.