realmaverickuk

#2271119 SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Posted Matt on 24 minutes ago

realmaverickuk, on 25 May 2012 - 01:04 PM, said:

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.

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.

#2270693 SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Posted Enkidu on Yesterday, 04:32 PM

Steven UK, on 24 May 2012 - 05:54 AM, said:

Hi Everyone,

I am quite frustrated at the moment, because unlike any software I have used before, the rankings for any threads being created are just not static.

I'll give you an example. If you have a WP Blog, created a thread, then it gets indexed, and search engines will position the page in the SERPS. Ok great, you think, are although you know the Google dance will affect things now and again, you pretty much know that the thread will be almost static.

Now, with the IPBoard software, forget the Google dance, it has almost become the IPB dance. :cry:

For example, a thread will be created, it will get indexed, and stay there for a few days, and if there is a tag associated, then a few days later the tag will leapfrog the actual thread, a week later the thread will vanish to page 3, and the tag will stay on page one, then a few weeks later when Google spiders have crawled the site again, you get pages like the following being indexed INSTEAD of the page that is going to drive visitors to your forum:

http://www.makemoney...&search_app=ccs

The above is an actual page being indexed. Why would page above be getting indexed, and also I have found 'search pages' being indexed too, above normal threads, and the search pages have zero content, and should not be getting indexed at all, really they should not.

One of the other issues, is Google are STILL indexing strings of code onto the end of threads, and because these are not front end threads, Google push them down to page 3 - duplicate content I think the problem is here, which the last update was supposed to fix.

Here is an example of the string: /page__st__20 Now, how can Google even see this? But it does, and it indexes it ABOVE the actual thread, but definitely demotes the importance of the thread due to this issue.

It is a gripe I suppose, and the gripe is there, because this IS fantastic software for ranking, but it is not static. There seems to be so many loose ends that search engines do not know what to do with it, and it seems worse since the last update. Ideally, the ONLY pages that should be getting indexed, are the categories, threads, tags, and that is it. All these other loose ends (quite a few of them) need closing on the IPB software, and this would then be a frightening piece of kit for real marketers, but for now, it is literally a lottery on what gets indexed and ranks, because the software is giving search engines just too many reference points to gather the information, usually the wrong reference points.

If Matt could also take a look, as this is really an SEO issue, that would be great. :sorcerer:

while the best place to get answers to these questions would be google webmaster forum. I suspect that the internal number of links pointing to that page in question is higher than the number of links to the thread itself.

think about it for a moment. How do you get to a thread in IPB? the answer is through the forum index page where the thread is posted. that is 1 link to the topic only. But in each page of the thread in question there is going to be link to the tags associated with the thread. If the thread has 5 pages then that is 5 links to the tags. Hence google would think that the tag page is more important because it has 5 links :smile:

cheers

#2270618 SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Posted Matt on Yesterday, 12:57 PM

Yeah it often is. What we want to do is to provide more information post upgrade so you know what was changed.

#2270605 SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Posted Marcher Technologies on Yesterday, 12:32 PM

Steven.
Do yourself a huge favor
either use the template merge center, or revert all templates.
and for the love of god... dont customize the stock IP.Board skin
all of the bugs you are having are because you customized the stock templates instead of making a new skin from it like sane people.

#2270600 SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Posted Steven UK on Yesterday, 12:25 PM

realmaverickuk, on 24 May 2012 - 12:19 PM, said:

@Steven, definitely go over the upgrade again and catch these extra bits.

We are sure we have, and doubled checked that all is upgraded, does not seem to be having the desired result. Hence the examples given here.

<<< I am wondering if staff would check it for us :poke:

#2270594 SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Posted Matt on Yesterday, 12:15 PM

We changed the #123 post link to use a proper anchor in 3.3. Before it used the old /page__p__123 format.

It was during one of my many SEO clean ups.

#2270586 SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Posted Marcher Technologies on Yesterday, 12:04 PM

Upgrade your skin, and i mean REALLY even if you nuke every template, upgrade your skin.
that link is wrong in the first place.. post is #entry{id}, page_st_{num} is page.

#2270526 SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Posted Shigure on Yesterday, 10:20 AM

realmaverickuk, on 24 May 2012 - 10:10 AM, said:

Yes, it does remove it for Google. Spoof your user agent, view this forum and you'll see no search box. It definitely works, in 3.3, Google is not treated just as a guest, other considerations like user agent are taken in to account I believe. So perhaps IPB have it set, that certain user agents are now allowed to use search.

TBH, there's no point in anybody being rude. I think in the past, the hostility has come from what appeared to be resistance from IPB. But lately, it seems they're listening more :smile:

Wow. The more you know...I didn't realize that search engines are in their own group now. Sort of.

Anyway this horrible line of code might add no index to your tags page.

<if test="$this->request['search_tags']">
<meta name='robots' content='noindex' />
</if>

Stick it in the globalTemplate. In the header obviously.

#2270512 SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Posted Steven UK on Yesterday, 09:44 AM

Yeah to IPB,

Actually, you know, this IPB software is without doubt the best looking forum software on the planet, and I have used them all, it is great on the eye and very enticing

Just a few important tweaks needed :smile:

PS - Yeah, I never realised I had some many postings on here, you are right, linking variety and all that, I will now have to do some linking of the natural variety somewhere else to even it out :tongue:

#2270503 SEO Rankings flying all over the place, and why is this..

Posted Steven UK on Yesterday, 09:24 AM

Yes, the upgrade was a bit of a nightmare, as we used to automatic upgrade, which did not work, then had to do it all manually, and check every single file in ftp and the dates, so it seems some were missed.

Thanks, I will get it checked again.

#2258945 IP.Downloads not so great SEO

Posted Alfa1 on 23 April 2012 - 08:57 PM

realmaverickuk, on 23 April 2012 - 05:26 PM, said:

I upgraded my board, we still have nasty urls.

The tag leads to /tags/forums/wallpaper/ which is great. But then if you use the sorting options or the content selector in the sidebar, things go down hill from there.

Thats quite a letdown. IPB really needs to nail down its SEO, as there are quite a lot of matters that need improvement.
I really like how they have started to use schema.org syntax. This is a good step forward. But its just one of many that needs to be taken.

#2254778 Comment Notifications, put it in the core.

Posted Marcher Technologies on 14 April 2012 - 06:52 PM

http://community.inv...s/#entry2254741
In making this rant, I realized something.
The issue is this: applications must implement their notifications for comments individually, which leaves a large separation in functionality in many cases.
I propose that if an application uses the comments controller and "Follow", instead of the application opting IN to comment notifications with its own separate code, do reverse, tie it down to the comments controller all apps use and force it to be an opt-out instead, where if desired, the application author could opt-out, for none, or a customized notify preference/return(yes, I am remembering the complexities of Content here, an over-ride for the notification content is quite vital), but would not have to implement anything to make use of it beyond the comments API/like class.
This would also facilitate Comment Notifications in the official apps without much effort once implemented.
I do not know of the rest, but I am simply tired of following items not of the forum application for literally no reason/benefit.

#2227116 IP.Board SEO Paging Issue

Posted bfarber on 01 February 2012 - 09:59 AM

realmaverickuk, on 31 January 2012 - 10:45 AM, said:

Sure, checkout this post from Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz.org

http://www.seomoz.or...user-experience

It explains things thoroughly. And I really think this is something that should be taken seriously.

Thanks.

Thanks for sharing.

#2226764 IP.Board SEO Paging Issue

Posted Shigure on 31 January 2012 - 12:57 PM

I don't even think next and prev are aesthetic, they make everything more difficult overall for those really really large threads.

For example if I'm browsing through a picture thread and I just want to look at posted pictures and the thread has 200 pages I like being able to click on page 180 and then 172 and then 164 and then 158. Maybe I'm the only person who does this? I just know that as far as page browsing goes I'm much happier clicking than I am opening a dropdown box and typing in a page number. I have done it where I'm on page 30 and want to go to page 80 so I just click my way their 40->50->60->70->80. I think thread browsing is more likely to increase (reducing bounce rates) if you see links to a lot of other pages. It's like when you go on Wikipedia to look up the history of PHP and end up reading about monkeys.

I'm just giving an example. I think the pros outweigh the cons. I suppose ultimately this doesn't matter since the setting is in 3.3 now but I just wanted to share. Those arguing that lots of page links ruin the user experience I just don't agree with.

#2226713 IP.Board SEO Paging Issue

Posted Shigure on 31 January 2012 - 10:48 AM

Hello.

In my personal experience seeing 10 page links has been helpful in navigation. I support changing the default to at least five.

Community Stats

Contact Information

User Tools

Friends

Latest Visitors