Index forum sites
-
Hi Moz Team,
somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer
Here is one more question:
I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential.
The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10.
a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow?
b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk
c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once.
d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1.
Looking forward to hear from you soon!
Best
Fabian
-
Hey Fabian,
I'm really sorry that your previous question was lost - I'm not sure what happened there! I don't see your previous question, but I did refund that question credit for you so you should now have that back, at least. Please feel free to report the question and we'll try to get you an answer as quickly as possible. If you're still having problems, please feel free to email help@seomoz.org and we'll try to look into it further. Thanks!
Cheers,
Aaron
-
To start with if the forum ISNT indexed, get the URLS changed, and try and get all the titles customosed so they arent generic across every thread.
I suggest a subdomain for forums, as you point out, it is seen as a separate site. you can always flow strenght from the forum into the main TLD by cross linking, which I think is much better to do, however some may disagree with this.
If I were in your position, I would prefer to release section by section - a massive blast of content would be more of a flag then a slow release - this is my personal opinion.
Re threads - I would follow/noindex all threads tht arent on the first page of the post - that way, the juice follows and gets crawled. Adding relcanon to those may also help preserve the strength...
-
Thanks Alfredo for your answer.
a) i am not sure that is possible as i think the vSEO Plugin changes all URLs, but ill check that.
b) Are you sure? Do you have any resource or article about that?
d) What i mean is: 1 Thread/Topic has lets say 500 Posts, which are evenly distributed over 50 Pages. Shall i index them all or only the first page of the Thread?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google indexing is slowing down?
I have up to 20 million unique pages, and so far I've only submitted about 30k of them on my sitemap. We had a few load related errors during googles initial visits, and it thought some were duplicates, but we fixed all that. We haven't gotten a crawl related error for 2 weeks now. Google appears to be indexing fewer and fewer urls every time it visits. Any ideas why? I am not sure how to get all our pages indexed if its going to operate like this... love some help thanks! HnJaXSM.png
Technical SEO | | RyanTheMoz0 -
Why is my site not being indexed?
Hi, I have performed a site:www.menshealthanswers.co.uk search on Google and none of the pages are being indexed. I do not have a "noindex" value on my robot tag This is what is in place: Any ideas? Jason
Technical SEO | | Jason_Marsh1230 -
Google not indexing my website
Hi guys, We have this website http://www.m-health-expo.nl/ but it is not indexed by google. In webmaster tools google says that it can not fetch the site due to the robots.txt but i do not see any faults in it. http://www.m-health-expo.nl/robots.txt Do you see something strange, it really bothers me.
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
301 Multiple Sites to Main Site
Over the past couple years I had 3 sites that sold basically the same products and content. I later realized this had no value to my customers or Google so I 301 redirected Site 2 and Site 3 to my main site (Site 1). Of course this pushed a lot of page rank over to Site 1 and the site has been ranking great. About a week ago I moved my main site to a new eCommerce platform which required me to 301 redirect all the url's to the new platform url's which I did for all the main site links (Site 1). During this time I decided it was probably better off if I DID NOT 301 redirect all the links from the other 2 sites as well. I just didn't see the need as I figured Google realized at this point those sites were gone and I started fearing Google would get me for Page Rank munipulation for 301 redirecting 2 whole sites to my main site. Now I am getting over 1,000 404 crawl errors in GWT as Google can no longer find the URL's for Site 2 and Site 3. Plus my rankings have dropped substantially over the past week, part of which I know is from switching platforms. Question, did I make a mistake not 301 redirecting the url's from the old sites (Site 2 and Site 3) to my new ecommerce url's at Site 1?
Technical SEO | | SLINC0 -
Help! Pages not being indexed
Hi Mozzers, I need your help.
Technical SEO | | bshanahan
Our website (www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com) stopped being indexed in search engines following a round of major changes to URLs and content. There were a number of dead links for a few days before 301 redirects were properly put in place. And now, only 3 pages show up in bing when I do the search "site:barnettcapitaladvisors.com". A bunch of pages show up in Google for that search, but they're not any of the pages we want to show up. Our home page and most important services pages are nowhere in search results. What's going on here?
Our sitemap is at http://www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com/sites/default/files/users/AndrewCarrillo/sitemap/sitemap.xml
Robots.txt is at: http://www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com/robots.txt Thanks!0 -
Will SEO Moz index our keywords if the site is ALL https?
We have a site coming into beta next week. Playing around with SEO Moz, I had trouble getting the keywords to rank at all. Was this because the site is entirely https? If yes, what else can SEO Moz NOT do if the site is all https? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Do index.php extensions count as duplicate content on Joomla sites?
When i run my error report, i see 2 duplicate pages, but both are the main domain and then the /index.php extension. how do i fix this? does it really count as duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | valetseo0 -
Is it a good idea to make 301 from a site which you know google has banned certain keywords for to a new site with similar content
Here is a short question re. 301. I read Dovers article on how to move an old domain to a new one. Say you have been a little inexperienced regarding linkbuilding and used some cheap service in the past and you have steadily seen that certain keywords have been depreciating in the SERP - however the PR is still 3 for the domain - now the qustion is should you rediect with a 301 in .htaccess to a new domain when you know that google does not like certain keywords with respect to the old site. Will the doom and gloom carry over to the new site?
Technical SEO | | Kofoed0