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realmaverickuk

Member Since 06 Sep 2007
Online Last Active 3 minutes ago
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Posts I've Made

In Topic: SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

2 minutes ago

View PostSteven UK, on 25 May 2012 - 01:30 PM, said:

I cannot agree with that, I honestly cannot, no other software on the planet allows page 2 to outrank page one, but even if it did, it should keep the same position. The titles, I feel are not the issue, because all other forum software has the same titles, and they do not have this issue.

Pages ARE being demoted - fact.

Here is yet another example I have found.

For the last 3 days my thread for a particular keyword was bang page 1 position 2, and I have just checked it again, and now it is page 2 with the string attached being:

makemoneyforum.com/topic/1405-bamboo-video-loophole-reviews-anthony-devine-wso/page__p__5087

The search Engines are systematically destroying my forum due to endless similar issues to this.

So here is a  direct question, and hopefully a temporary (albeit not ideal) fix:

How in God's can we stop those strings being indexed? Any type of string.

Steven, I didn't say the titles are THE issue. I suggested how they could be improved to help your issue. Will it help? YES it will. Just because VB doesn't employ the strategy, doesn't mean it won't help. If you only copy your competition, you can only ever hope you be equal to them.

Matt has fixed the issue with page__p__5087 but you've not upgraded properly, this isn't really Matts fault. You need to get that fixed, it's only an issue for you, due to a failed upgrade.

The paging string, which is something different entirely. I clearly said that this can be fixed by changing to page-2, as it will be universally understandable to the search engines. Which is also correct. I then offered a way to further ensure the subsequent pages don't compete with page 1.

I cannot quite see what you're disagreeing with. Because what I said, was 100% correct.

In Topic: SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

12 minutes ago

View PostMatt, on 25 May 2012 - 01:14 PM, said:

Thanks. To stop sending mixed messages and dead ends to Google has been my aim since 3.2. I've been monitoring our own webmastertools account and analytics and I've made changes based on what I've seen.

For example, I removed access to the search engine for guests, removed the last post by information for guests, removed links to avatars for guests, removed 'soft 404s' for guests where a page had no content or a message saying 'no matches found', etc. This alone has seen our crawl errors drop by 80% on this site alone.

I have some ideas to improve this further in 3.4.

Matt, you're definitely heading in the right direction. I'm feeling somewhat frustrated, that everybody really does believe they're an SEO expert, which is rich coming from me, because I too believe I am. Though at least I'm not spouting utter nonsense and offering proper reasoning.

Anyway, I do think a carefully selected focus group needs to be chosen, to work with you on the SEO of IPB. It really won't be a massive task to completely clean things up and make it the best optimized forum software in the world.

In Topic: SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

16 minutes ago

First of all, Matt you're doing a good job so far, but this really isn't as complicated as you are suggesting. Some SEO is perhaps trial and error but there are some things, which are proven and logic.

Lets deal with the issues Steven is having in the thread. We can look at the bigger SEO issues later maybe.
  • Tags: These are generally not useful and usually do more harm than good. I don't believe it's an issue for IPB to fix, as there is nothing really to be fixed as such. The major SEO plugins for Wordpress, add noindex to tag pages. They are generally full of duplicate and thin content. In the case of IPB, they were even worse than usual. Largely due to the sorting options, leading to tons and tons of duplicate content. However I submitted a bug and I believe Matt fixed this in 3.3.2, and the sorting options now lead back to the Canonical version?

    The most likely cause of tags outranking main content, is because of the fact the tags have more links going to them than the thread itself. If you have a 10 page discussion, each page has a link to the tag page, with an optimised link. Especially if you create a tag, that matches your topic title perfectly. More links to a page = more important in Googles eyes. There are other factors, but this is a reason why it maybe happening. But again, this isn't a problem with IPB, there's a very clear, logical answer.

    Overall I would simply not use tags. OR I would add noindex to them, so that they're not indexed. If you're going to use them, without noindex, do so carefully but you still have the chance of having the tag outrank the thread.
  • Page 2 outranking page 1: Again, there is a logical reason, but in this case, I do think perhaps Matt can apply a few tweaks, that should prevent it from happening.
    1. Alter page__st__20 to page-2 and create a 301 redirect from page__st__20 to page-2. This will send a much clearer message to the engines.
    2. At present the titles are very similar, and as Google is struggling to understand the relationship between page 1 and page 2, you have 2 pages fighting to rank for that term. Once issue 1 gets sorted, this may no longer be an issue. But I would still switch the titles of page 2+, to something like this:

    Page 1: Title: SEO Rankings flying all over the place | Invision Power
    Page 2: Title: Page 2 of 2 | Invision Power | SEO Rankings flying all over the place

    All it's effectively doing, is un-optimising page 2, to ensure our first page, is the clear winner when it comes to the keyword or phrase.     I don't think any of this is rocket science or needs any complex solution. These are very clear reasons why these things can happen.
There is a lot more IMO that does need to be fixed. But I do sometimes feel as though I'm repeating myself.

EDIT: If tags were ever to be used as a way to drive extra traffic to the forums, then they'd need a lot of work, to optimise them. But then the most optimised they are, the more chance they have of outranking threads. However, perhaps it could be an option, to prevent people creating tags, with the same name as the thread.

Finally, Google doesn't like indexing results, it's logic, why would a search engine, with results, want to send a visitor to more results. However, it does happen.

In Topic: SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

35 minutes ago

There is too much for me to read, to catch up, but what I have read, is frustrating me.

Everybody does seem to believe they're an expert in SEO and yet almost all of what's been posted, is nonsense.

I'm going to go over my own posts, which had the actual reasons and solutions to the problems, post them all together in a single thread.

The objective, is simply to stop sending mixed messages to Google, stop sending Google to dead ends and duplicate content.

Somebody suggested stop using Canonical tag?! That's potentially the worst suggestion of all.

In Topic: SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Yesterday, 01:22 PM

View PostMikey B, on 24 May 2012 - 01:21 PM, said:

IP.SEO allows that.

How? I haven't seen such an option.

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