I've observed over the past few days since using VBseo in Vbulletin that many of my pages indexed on Google are now 'cached' (indexed pages). Before this, many pages shown on Google via site:www.com had no title and no description except for URL. This is quite the case for several Vbulletin forums that I searched on Google; although Google shows many pages being indexed, many of these end with showthread?t=xx or member?=33 and have only a 'similar pages' description written below the page indexed (eg). Is it better to have pages of content 'cached' by Google on the index, or is that really not important and having as many pages being indexed as 'similar pages' a better goal?
I think the more pages you have cached the better. If google thinks they are worth caching then it must think they are important. Make sure if you are struggling to get pages cached that they all have different and descriptive titles.
I'm going to have to agree. Cached pages typically means more pages that have PR, which of course is always good. Anything you can do to get your pages into the cache is a good thing.
Balderdash. Google doesn't cache dynamic pages. That doesn't mean they aren't indexed or that they don't rank highly for relevant search terms.
@HeadBuilder: Have you implemented a Google / Yahoo Sitemap for your forum yet? If not, I would recommend that you do that as well.
Whew! i saw this thread and thought... i have the same exact problem... what is happening? is google penalizing me? did i do something wrong? did Jagger hit me? Then i see its just because they are dynamic... thats sort of a relief. now i need to figure out why my traffic has dropped to 100 uniques to 20... :/ http://www.google.com/search?source...5-45,GGLG:en&q=site:pghsource.cagintranet.com Thank you Minstrel... i take what you have to say very seriously because you always tell it how it is, and you really know what you are talking about.
OK. So they do cache a few dynamic pages... Perhaps a matter of number of backlinks to that particular page... But that aside, dynamic pages can and do rank well for search terms regardless of whether they are cached or display page rank on the tool bar.
jward... but my pages or his are not labeled "supplemental" minstrel... thanks, i just hope my site snaps out of it. Maybe it's because it is a holiday weekend here in the 'burgh. who knows, just have to wait and see.
Pages that are not cached, may rank well, but not based on their content. The actual content of a page that is not cached cannot be found in the G index.
Interesting if it's correct - I've learned something here. I just took a look at a sampling of some recent Google referrer strings to my forum - all dynamic pages with no mod_rewrite. The first thing I noticed is that there are a lot more pages cached than I realized, and some fairly recent - the second thing is that I picked a few of these below at random and used the search strings in Google: I don't pretend to have checked them all but every one I checked is cached.