What makes you say Google doesn’t like the forum? It looks to me link there are about 209 topics (188 + 21) and in your support sitemap, there look to be 209 <loc> which is perfect. There is no robots.txt interfering with indexing. There is no meta tag that interferes with indexing.
Checking google, it looks like there are 325 results here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areclaimyourskin.co.uk%2Fsupport
If you take out the 79 pages with the word “tag” in the result (which Google indexed even though you didn’t list them in the sitemap), you have 246 support pages indexed.
You can also do this, http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areclaimyourskin.co.uk%2Fsupport+-tags and get 198 results, also very close to what you have in the forum and the sitemap.
What results were you expecting that you did not receive. Also, does Google Webmaster Tool say anything? Any warnings or errors or anything like that?
From what I’ve noticed I would say it’s indexing TOO much.
Having profile pages indexed, doesn’t that devaluate once’s website/forum rankings?
Just guessing.
Google indexes my forum nicely here. I rank first for the phrase “Quake Live invites” in google. Decent linkbacks and crawlability are what makes a page rank good in the search engines.
Thanks for your feedback and thanks for the links chrishajer.
I have no errors in Google Web tools. I suppose “indexed” was the wrong word – i’m more concerned with the rankings and the fact that they differ so much from the main site and forum, & I have no pr for reclaimyourskin.co.uk/support. I’ll keep working at it.
Yep, there’s a big difference between page rank and index stats.
pagerank is only updated every several months.
You main site only has PR2, which is low/very low for the main page, therefore you can’t expect much pagerank to go further down on you forum. You “earn” pagerank, it’s not just a gift from Google
all that you need is some external links from quality sources to your forum and that´s it.
Having profile pages indexed, doesn’t that devaluate once’s website/forum rankings?
Oops, this is quite interesting, does anybody have a “SEO friendly” robots.txt for bbpress? Any suggestion on what should be disallowed?
Obviously I’m not sure, I’m just wondering