Hi, I am looking for tips to SEO my forum. There are currently over 70,000 pages in google. The site is HabboDiscussion.com. Any tips would be appreciated.
Your site has 593,459 post, but you only have 70,000 pages indexed with google?? You do not have a site map generator installed do you? And if you do not have a site map generator, then maybe you have not submitted that site map to your google webmaster tools? 1 - set up your google webmaster tools - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard?pli=1 2 - get a site map generator installed. Here is a link to a free generator, its the same one I have on my site - http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=184573 3 - submit the site map to your google webmaster tools. Once you get that going, google will be indexing a LOT more urls then it is right now. My site has around 380,000 post, and my site also has over 325,000 URLs indexed with google. Since your site has 593,459 post, you should have around 500,000 pages indexed with google instead of the 70,000. Once you get your site set up in google webmaster tools, click the site name, go to Statistics, then click the "What Googlebot sees" link - this will give you a list of the keywords that google sees in your backlinks. This is also a list of keywords that google sees as being important on your site. From this list you will know what keywords you need to tweak in your backlinks to improve your targeted nitch. Once you have all of that set up, look into "Yahoo site explorer" - its Yahoos version of google webmaster tools. Through site explorer you can submit that same site map to yahoo.
Look at #2 of my above post, there is a link to the VB SEO site map - the same exact one that is installed on my forum. And yes, it does work. It builds a site map every night at around 2:00 am, with 49,000 URLs in about 4 or 5 different files. Then those files are submitted to Google. There is a 50,000 URL limit per site map file, so the script builds several files to be able to submit all of the URLs.
80,000 indexed now, and I just submitted the content. Also, I am having trouble with cookies - and it seeing differences when I login to habbodiscussion.com VS. www.habodiscu.... Which one should take authority? And how do I set this in HTACCESS? Which is best for SEO? Cheers,
You don't get a page per post But 45,555 threads (plus multi-page threads), plus the 3,702 members (one page each). Thats close to 50k pages there itself, assuming those are all one page threads, which they probably aren't, so 70k indexed isn't to shabby. 1. Remove the quick register from the top of every page 2.Add heading tags for vBulletin SEO 3. You can also Optimize vBulletin For Rankings many other ways, such as storing CSS as filesheets, automatically quote thread titles in replies. 4. Choose either a www. or no-www version of the site. Visit http://no-www.org/for more info on how to set it up. Either version will work, and will not get a bennefit from one over the other. However, you need to chose one (I prefer no-www) and use that, and not both. 5. Use a vBulletin robots.txt to prevent duplicate content, and junk pages from being indexed. Having 5892044 pages indexed is useless if they are all junk. Make sure you're only getting the most valuable content indexed. 6. Build more relevant back links. (Directory, and search engine submissions aren't relevant or useful backlinks)
593,459 post, and to only have 70,000 indexed with google, that aint too good. My site has 391,468 post and I have 336,000 pages indexed with google. For his site to have almost 600,000 post, he should have at least 500,000 pages, if not close to 550,000 pages indexed with google. The site map generator will help improve those stats. And yes, you do get a page per post. Because each post and the thread has its own unique URL.
@Kev : IMO, FightRice is right. You shouldn't count 1 post for 1 page. The number of (publicly visible) threads is a better measure for indexed pages. The showpost.php pages are duplicate content. The same content is available inside the showthread.php pages too. And that's what should rank in the SERPs. We don't want both of them indexed in Google. ie, showpost.php competing against our OWN corresponding showthread.php pages. In the sitemap, only include these pages : - showthread, forumdisplay and (if really needed) member profile pages.
Thats a lot of duplicate content my man! You're better off having entire threads indexed and not single posts. Having a huge listing in google is good, but if its all junk duplicate content, its of no benefit. Try to reduce the showpost content in Google's index, and I bet you don't lose any traffic, or member conversions. If anything it should start to increase, as the results will be more on target and the searchers should find your results more on target. Good luck
Instead of getting this thread too far off track, I started a new thread about site maps and your showpost suggestion. See this thread - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1154320