Help! My forum is up and running very smoothly for more than one month, BUT google for some reason never indexes any of the pages in the forum. Yahoo, on the other hand, indexes every single one. What can I do to make it more google friendly?

Thanks,

Thomas

[@aphelionz Participant 18 years ago]

Do you have pretty permalinks? that seems to really, really help the most out of all the SEO tricks that are already most taken care of for you (graciously) by the bbpress coders

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years ago]

Yes, I think I have them set correct in the config file as:

// Set to true if you want pretty permalinks.

$bb->mod_rewrite = true;

My links look like the following example:

http://www.domain.com/forum/topic/70?replies=3

I think these are what they call “pretty permalinks”. But still Google ignores the entire /forum/ subfolder and does not index it. On the other hand, Google indexes the rest of the website very well including my blog which is using WordPress.

For the record, I have already checked to be sure the robots.txt file is not blocking spider access to the /forum/ subfolder.

Any other ideas anyone???

[@ardentfrost Member 18 years ago]

If the forum is new, maybe they just haven’t gotten around to indexing it yet?

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years ago]

No, it’s been up for more than a month. I tried something new yesterday by adding a sitemap (see another thread in this forum). Within two hours they had indexed all of the topics. So there must have been some reason why google was not indexing it before. The sitemap solution solves the problem partially, but I think it means I have to resubmit the site map over and over again. I am not quite sure on this issue.

Still, though the sitemap method helps, I wonder what is stopping google from indexing the forum under normal conditions?

[@trent Member 18 years ago]

I am not using permalinks, but google has indexed me and that happened in about 3 days. This even after changing from blog.trentadams.ca/forums back to forum.trentadams.ca

Trent

[@rimianperkins Member 18 years ago]

Permalinks won’t have anything to do with it. Did you perhaps accidentally violate Google’s terms of use policy?

There’s some info here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/

[@marky Member 18 years ago]

You’re probably just in the “sandbox.”

If your entire website is new, then Google can take up to 6 months before it will appear on the index. If you’re unsure, I’d recommend signing up for Google’s sitemap service. The sitemaps interface lets you check how often your site has been crawled. If Google is crawling your site, but it’s not listed yet, then there’s a good chance you’re just waiting in the sandbox for a little while.