Should google be indexing individual posts in a forum?

[Mr Lucky]

Obviously google is indexing individual posts, because I can see it is. But is this good or bad for SEO?

This post shows up quite near the top of results, but I would have thought it would be more useful for the thread to be indexed not post #7, which actually doesn't contain any of the search terms . In fact the text snippets quotes post #2



I thought this was the point of robots.txt

Disallow: /posts/

Although I'm aware that doesn't stop Google doing anything. In spite of this:

The robots.txt file, for example, prevents posts from being indexed, unlike threads which are. This avoids diluting the good information of your forum in thousands, tens of thousands, millions of posts.

Any thoughts ?

 

[QuackieMackie]

This would be because of your site map no? when you submit your site good google search console you input the site map for them to use.

if you go into Setup -> Options -> XML sitemap generation you can include and remove these options:

• Node
• Tag
• Thread
• User

 

[Mr Lucky]

if you go into Setup -> Options -> XML sitemap generation you can include and remove these options:

Those are the only options though, and does not include Post.

 

[Anatoliy]

I guess it is very bad from seo point of view. As there are links to posts, google "sees" them as web pages. As short useless ones. And a site, powered by a forum engine as a pile of useless pages. I will not even start about the fact, that all links to posts are redirects in XF, which makes a pile of useless "pages" even more useless.

Using a forum, especially XF, as a cms - a bad idea. Too bad I figured it out too late.

 

[Anatoliy]

They say that a correctly asked question has an answer in it.) I would rewrite the question.

Should google be indexing individual posts in a forum?

Should links to individual posts be displayed to guests?

 

[Digital Doctor]

maybe google read the entire thread and thought that post was the most relevant to the searcher ?

I thought google thought of Xenforo threads as pages.
and posts could be considered a section of the page that was most relevant.

 

[Digital Doctor]

so for this thread:

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/why-are-you-running-an-eol-version-of-php.194090/page-3

Page 3 is what google sees.
and there are a total of 10 pages that google sees.

 

[Mr Lucky]

They say that a correctly asked question has an answer in it.) I would rewrite the question.

Should google be indexing individual posts in a forum?

Should links to individual posts be displayed to guests?

The question was more about whether Google should be indexing posts, a subsequent question that some may have inferred is why would Google index an individual post when it is just a small part of a thread?