Search engine spiderability

[Ben_S]

IS there any way to make the forum spidearable? Google only seems to get as far the board index pages

Would be good if it would get right into the messages...

[Joseph Fung]

change your boardurl to make all the links relative rather than absolute.

Spiders don't spider links to pages outside the current site, and by linking to http://www.yabb.info/community/index.php?board=142;action=search rather than to just index.php?board=142;action=search makes the spider think it's another website.

try changing your board url to just index.php

I haven't tried it myself, so I don't know if it will work for sure.

[Ben_S]

good idea, I'll give it a go

[groundup]

tell us how it works out

[Ben_S]

Will do, changed the boardurl from http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum to /forum. Suppose it will take a month or two till I know if it works or not though...

[Mach8]

Are you sure this is entirely true? I've searched Google for my forum and found it has indexed up to the level of boards... hmm

[Ben_S]

ok then it gets to the boards but not the actuall messages...

[Greg Robson]

I'm no expert on search technology - but I think the problem is that search scripts won't index large amounts of dynamic content  

There are so many links on a forum that it would be too deep to go down to the messages - there must be 200,000,000 forum pages!

One technique that could be used is an index page - this has brief desciptions of each message and a link to them.

I'll have a look at http://www.searchenginewatch.com and see if they've got any info.

[Joseph Fung]

I know that most, if not all, of the avatar gallery here is indexed by google, while the rest of the pages do not appear to be.

[Ben_S]

the forums @ http://www.nukeforums.com (its a phpbb 1.3) seem to be well listed by google, so it should be possible.

They are using links as Joseph suggested so maybe that will help...

[Dani]

It doesn't work if you use relative links.

The forum part works ...

But the e-mails sent to the user (e.g. after registration) will say

"Visit /forums/index.php!" and stuff like that, instead of the full URL. I switched to relative urls and then some users brought it to my attention like 2 hours after the switch! (guess it's noticable and occurs in multiple places)

[Ben_S]

never thought of that

Prehaps a change for yse2?

Gonna leave it anyway and see if the search engines get down to it...

[Dani]

Where can I edit the emails sent to members (in the php scripts)?
This way I can change the urls to absolute in these emails - while leaving the default for the boards as relative ...

[groundup]

if you do get it edited, can you make it as a mod?

[Dani]

It looks like we're in desperate need of such a mod.

I just spoke to one of my users ... he has notification set so that he is emailed each time someone replies to a topic he started.

And the links in the notification emails weren't complete!

I think this is definitely something which needs attention ... do other ppl agree?