Google's new ranking system punishes forums?

Google is not going to rank a forum filled with RSS threads because they always rank the original source first.

But if you are running RSS news on your homepage I don't think they will give you a negative for that, just don't fill your forums with RSS content.
 
trilogy33 said:
Poss. because it takes very little effort to populate a board full of links.
Click to expand...
+1 I know of a forum where 95% of the content is being pulled via RSS feeds and the admin has barely posted...sort of ridiculous to think you'll grow a forum community going down that route.
rolleyes.png
 
The only RSS feed I ever used under a.n.other.forum was a BBC News feed, planted into a widget.
I don't think "weather widgets" powered by google count, or do they?
Both widgets plainly in my case linked to the content provider...they weren't to initiate thread building.

That's enough widgeting from me at 5.15am :D
 
turtile said:
It's the third link in my signature. I guess it's taking more weight for linked pages?

Thanks for your help!
Click to expand...

1. Your forum is new. You have very few pages indexed in Google. Do you use a Sitemap generator? Did you upload your sitemap to Google? If you do not, use Google's webmaster tools to find out what Google is seeing on your site, which queries it's ranking you for and what errors if any, it's finding.

2. You have no one linking you. Yahoo's siteexplorer has only wunderground.com linking you.

3. Your forum is about unusual plants, so I understand your theme's motivation. However what is the effect the style is having on your users? My personal opinion is that it is too bright and doesn't look very professional. But I may be wrong. The best way to find out is by creating a thread and asking your users what they think about the site's look, if they are having any issues finding something that they want to do etc. The reason that is very important is because Search engine traffic has very short attention span. Ideally you want the people coming from search engines, to stay, but most won't because a> they did not find what they were looking for and went away b> they did not like the site's look c>there was nothing enticing enough for them on the page they landed on to make them click on another page on your site.

4. Do you have a off-topic section on your forum? You need to create threads on any and every topics in the off-topic to enforce interest and loyality to your visitors/members.

5. Are there any other forums/blogs out there which deal with similar topics? Are you member there? Do you have a reputation in the niche? If not, it's extremely important and you should start building one. Don't spam, there's not a need to even drop your link. If you come across as an expert elsewhere and establish a reputation, your site will be discovered by itself.

These are few things of the top of my head, there's lot more. :)
 
Google have not punished forums, and it is inaccurate to make such assumptions. Everyone thinks their website should rank on page one... guess what... everyone who competes against you thinks the same.

Google rankings are subjective to over a thousand different factors these days... most of which are irrelevant to the average site owner. Google's very public focus has been on delivering local content, and new content, not old, stale page. So for all those forum owners who used to rank on page one for old deep pages, you will find most of that traffic gone, unless the thread has been raised again with new information.

I have not seen any such drops on any of my forums, only the normal progressive increases as more posting continues. The more activity on your forum, the more interactive you ensure your homepage is, etc... the better you will continue to rank. You cannot stack dynamic content vs. static pages, hence why less emphasis has been placed on older / static pages, content that doesn't change.... because more than likely, it has been stacked to rank high, whether relevant or not.

Google are just getting smarter, which is great for search. One day a term can be on page 1, the next day page 10, the next page 2, etc... because dynamic content is constantly changing the syntactic makeup of the pages semantics, thus its overall definition and meaning to Google. Then what everyone often forgets in their little bubble, is that you have all these competing websites against your terms also constantly changing things to get noticed.
 
Good stuff Walter, they have come up with a new term, 'content farms' which is a play on 'link farms' which Google also targeted long ago.

I just came across a 'content farm' ranking in Google last night, it was a 'so called search engine' that attempts to rank for every term under the Sun by using a script to create all sorts of pages with a tiny block of keywords and two large Adsense ad zones.

About a year or two ago I reported many sites ranking for my forums content that Google was ranking regularly, this one guy was scraping my site and publishing it in another language, Google was ranking the forum which was an exact copy of our forum index and threads.

We also had a search engine engineer who created a stealth spider that was exploiting dynamic ISP networks in Taiwan to steal content, you would ban 6 IP's and he would come back with 6 more constantly, this went on for months even stretching into a year.

Now the guy changes user agents and is at it again until he exhausts every IP on the networks he is exploiting in China and Taiwan.
 
So, in short, Google's found a way of putting an end to or lessening the impact of sites that try and pull the most from the least.
The most amount of traffic or revenue with the least amount of work or input.
 
Try is the keyword, for many years all they did was ban the domain from the search index after so many spam reports, but it looks like they are trying to be proactive now.

It would seem simple, I had suggested years ago to them that they should index the original author and give priority by original publication date of that original material.

For example, this post should rank for Xenforo since it is original and published here first, even if I copy it and place it on my forum or someone else quotes the post on their forums.
 
They have a never ending job in essence, because as fast as they fight one tactic, another emerges / is produced to counter the effect.

It has been known for many many years now, steer clear of advertising based websites, as Google targets them to find those selling advertising where you can clearly identify... the site isn't real quality, they just bumped it up for the purpose to sell links, ie. link farming took a different course.

Forums who use RSS feeds and don't filter / add their own unique spin to news stories and/or actually have enough user base where comments are being posted to make the content unique... they should have all been pretty much wiped out as well on those aspects, ie. your forum now has a sudden 10 - 50% decline in traffic, likely as it was either running signature links as its main source to get a user base or pumping in others content via RSS feeds with no users commenting to make it uniquely identifiable and news worthy of its own accord.

I personally find it amusing when Google makes an update and then the users doing everything wrong, begin complaining. Sick sense of satisfaction maybe that those gaming the search engines just got gamed back!
eek.png
 
AnthonyCea said:
http://www.unusualplants.net/forums/

Nice forum and design too !!

How old is the forum now ??
Click to expand...

Thanks, it's just temporary (re-colored Flexile). I'm working on a completely new design/logo etc. The site has been public for about a year and I created it 1 1/2 years ago.

sadikb said:
1. Your forum is new. You have very few pages indexed in Google. Do you use a Sitemap generator? Did you upload your sitemap to Google? If you do not, use Google's webmaster tools to find out what Google is seeing on your site, which queries it's ranking you for and what errors if any, it's finding.
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm using a sitemap generator and sending it to Google.
sadikb said:
3. Your forum is about unusual plants, so I understand your theme's motivation. However what is the effect the style is having on your users? My personal opinion is that it is too bright and doesn't look very professional. But I may be wrong. The best way to find out is by creating a thread and asking your users what they think about the site's look, if they are having any issues finding something that they want to do etc. The reason that is very important is because Search engine traffic has very short attention span. Ideally you want the people coming from search engines, to stay, but most won't because a> they did not find what they were looking for and went away b> they did not like the site's look c>there was nothing enticing enough for them on the page they landed on to make them click on another page on your site.
Click to expand...

I've asked a the members what they like but they aren't very critical. They mainly want a design that has green it it.
sadikb said:
4. Do you have a off-topic section on your forum? You need to create threads on any and every topics in the off-topic to enforce interest and loyality to your visitors/members.
Click to expand...

Yes, which types of things do you find are the most popular in the off-topic section?
sadikb said:
5. Are there any other forums/blogs out there which deal with similar topics? Are you member there? Do you have a reputation in the niche? If not, it's extremely important and you should start building one. Don't spam, there's not a need to even drop your link. If you come across as an expert elsewhere and establish a reputation, your site will be discovered by itself.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's how most of the members I have joined. They new about the site and told a few others about it.

Thanks
 
I am very happy with the changes. I've noticed my ad fill rates on contextweb shot up which has been nice. Also noticed the Yahoo owned forum that changed their name to match ours is not even on page 1 anymore so enjoyed that.
 
turtile said:
Yes, I'm using a sitemap generator and sending it to Google.
Click to expand...
Probably more important now since a few of us have brand new boards.
I ran without a sitemap for years and google was populating nicely. In fact the only time I needed a robots.txt file was when yahoo slurp pretty near piled us into denial of service a few years ago with their bots...they kinda went crazy for a month or two.
I often wonder if, a sitemap is neccessary if google is having problems indexing content, for whatever reason and one needs to "jump start" the indexing process.
I've added a sitemap now and let's see what happens, because at the mo. with a fresh new board, coming in with no import, building content slowly but surely, the big "g" seems to be ignoring me.

To note, in the past, google was so efficient it was quite entertaining to watch:
I'd make a post edit, something as tiny as adding a full stop (or period) to a single post, go and see "Who's Online" and straight away, sometimes within seconds, I'd see the googlebot spidering away doing its job, crawling, fixing and then running off into a dark corner. Fantastic! :)

One most obvious question I don't see asked is:
"When I've submitted with the sitemap, links are sweet and things are running smooth etc. Can I then delete the sitemap files and run without them?"
Come to think of it, possibly more pressing is:
"When I've done the sitemap and it's all indexed etc. Is any modification that generated them, still neccessary to be installed?"
 
I removed my sitemap when I switched to XenForo.

They're of limited use when it comes to dynamic content unless they're constantly updated.

Google is still crawling and indexing just as it always has.
 
Brogan said:
I removed my sitemap when I switched to XenForo.

They're of limited use when it comes to dynamic content unless they're constantly updated.

Google is still crawling and indexing just as it always has.
Click to expand...
I get the feeling I'm going to get the same result, like before. That's a good thing.
All a case of build content and give it time. I guess it's not in an indexer's best interest to make processes as hard as possible, they'd have to go into great depth explaining everything; wait a minute, they already do :D
The skeptic in me thinks (flame suit being zipped up) that newcomers to the scene that want hard and fast results with top performance from the word go, more often than not, will spend countless hours tweaking, modifying the code and having sleepness nights about "have I killed my exposure by..x, y, z? Aaargh!"
An SEO company will quite happily take their money.

SEO/Ranking bomb planted, runs for cover!! lol
 
Brogan is correct, I have never submitted any site maps to Google and my main forum has no problems, as long as you have a proper duplicate content elimination strategy (URL redirection), great robots.txt file, proper meta data or lack of in all the right places you should do fine.

Rule number one: test and keep testing to see what works best for your particular forum software and get help from others running the same script, find out what is working for them, in the case of XF you could copy what this forum is doing since it has ranked well from the start !!
 
AnthonyCea said:
Brogan is correct, I have never submitted any site maps to Google and my main forum has no problems, as long as you have a proper duplicate content elimination strategy (URL redirection), great robots.txt file, proper meta data or lack of in all the right places you should do fine.

Rule number one: test and keep testing to see what works best for your particular forum software and get help from others running the same script, find out what is working for them, in the case of XF you could copy what this forum is doing since it has ranked well from the start !!
Click to expand...

where and how do I integrate a robots.txt file into my XenForo installation ?
 
In your web root.
It should look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /community/find-new/
Disallow: /community/account/
Disallow: /community/attachments/
Disallow: /community/goto/
Disallow: /community/posts/
Disallow: /community/login/
Disallow: /community/admin.php
Allow: /
 

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