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Site not doing well in Google

After my switch to ElkArte, Google seems to lost track of my url and very posts are indexed. Can you kindly guide me to fix it :(

Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #1

What were you using before?

The URL scheme between the script you used and Elk is fairly different, you should have put in place redirects in order to send google and (more importantly) people to the new addresses.

What version of php are you running? (Need to know in order to use the proper methods in the script.)
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Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #2

@emanuele I switched from MyBB to Elk and PHP version:  5.6 (cPanel)

Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #3

Okay, put the attached file in the root (i.e. where you have SSI.php), then add the following to your htaccess file:
Code: [Select]
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)$
RewriteRule ^Thread-(.+)$ redirect.php?tname=$1&%1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)$
RewriteRule ^Forum-(.+)$ redirect.php?bname=$1&%0 [R=301,L]
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Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #4

@emanuele i will add it and let you know how it performs

Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #5

@emanuele Can you open the site now? Heard there is an issue with links.

Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #6

Looks good to me as well, and the redirects are apparently working:
http://indiantalkzone.com/Forum-Mobile?page=9 goes to http://indiantalkzone.com/index.php/board,18.135.html
and
http://indiantalkzone.com/Thread-Netfire-Broadband goes to http://indiantalkzone.com/index.php/topic,1386.html

There may be issues in case of multiple topics with the same subject or different boards with the same name, but since the forum is not so old I guess it should be unlikely.
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Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #7

Thanks a lot for your help, now things have been sorted out. Keep going team!

Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #8

Sad to say, Google indexed around 24 pages 1 week back. Now if i check site:indiantalkzone.com only 14 pages are up :( Is my site being penalized?

Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #9

From the same search I see google has 2290 pages of your website indexed.
I went a little overboard and counted on your site all the pages related to boards and topics, from my math they are 2069, that leave aside few "special" pages (10 from action=recent, login, registration, contact, search, credits, stats).

Take in consideration that Elk does use rel=canonical quite a lot, so for example:
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3335.0
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3335.msg23719#msg23719
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3335.msg23720#msg23720
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3335.msg23721#msg23721
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3335.msg23765#msg23765
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3335.msg23795#msg23795
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3335.msg23796#msg23796
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3335.msg23797#msg23797
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3335.msg23799#msg23799
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3335.msg24245#msg24245
etc. are all considered the exact same page (and in fact they are), while in MyBB are all different pages potentially indexed separated.
So, I'd say that less pages is expected.

There are two things bothering me in your setup:
1) the users have the profiles visible to guests, and google seems to prefer users profile to the actual topics,
2) all the urls in google (or at least most of them) have the PHPSESSID attribute that shouldn't be there.
The first may lead to some useless content duplication confusing google on what is important.
The second is pretty odd, really.

@Spuds the PHPSESSID is dropped from the canonical url only if it matches the "correct" session id, in that case, apparently, google indexed the URL with a session id, and now they are not removed from the canonical URL when visited. What do you think about stripping any parameter /PHPSESSID=\w+/?
Also, I can't see where the SID constant is being defined? ???
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Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #10

Quote@Spuds the PHPSESSID is dropped from the canonical url only if it matches the "correct" session id, in that case, apparently, google indexed the URL with a session id, and now they are not removed from the canonical URL when visited. What do you think about stripping any parameter /PHPSESSID=\w+/?
Also, I can't see where the SID constant is being defined? ???
SID is just another "internal" php constant ... "containing either the session name and session ID in the form of "name=ID" or empty string if session ID was set in an appropriate session cookie. This is the same id as the one returned by session_id()."

I think PHPSESSID will only be in the character set [-,a-zA-Z0-9] so I'd use that over \w to be more selective.  I'd guess it always ends in ; or EOL so  could use that as well.




Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #11

 emanuele feels stupid... lol
I saw some checks to see if it constant was defined and I thought it was something we were creating. O:-)
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Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #12

LOL .. I only remember because I did the same thing when I was removing /e's from the code

Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #13

@emanuele and @Spuds Huh well...what should i do? Did the MyBB to Elkarte got screwed up? Is there any fix?

Re: Site not doing well in Google

Reply #14

I don't think there anything to fix.
Also because I'm not entirely sure there is anything broken.
I personally would not allowed guests to see profiles, but that I guess is a personal choice.

Apart from that, it looks like google takes a while to grab the new topics (and usually grabs profiles before them), you may have a look at the webmaster tools to see if there is anything odd reported.
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