Working Nomad Forum

Webby · WN Admin

I have noticed a lot of the WN forum is supplemental in the Google serps. The blog is n't.

Does anyone have any advice on how to change this? I have made changes to the templates in the past to help SEO but I am sure there is more to supplementals than that.
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PT · WN Senior Member

I found this article interesting:

http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2007/04/29/sanar-google-skyfacet-tech-cx_ag_0430googhell.html

I think it involves playing with your robots file and blocking anything that could appear as being duplicate.

Perhaps things like the memberlist? You might be able to find something useful on the phpBB forum.

Is there a way to make the URLs more SEF in phpBB. I am sure there is a mod available.
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Webby · WN Admin

Yes I have tried a way of making the pages more index-able and it worked for a while but now they have slipped back into supplementals.

Thanks for the article, yea I think blocking certain duplicate pages is the way to go, might try and experiment a bit.
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Kirsty · WN Senior Member

I was looking at John Chow's blog last week and there was a guy who contacted him about his supplemental results. There's a link to the guy's site from JC's blog and I had a quick read and it seemed to offer a lot of advice. I don't have time now to look up the link but I can have a poke around later.
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Neale · WN Senior Member

Two things affect the sups
PR on the home page plays a part the higher it is the deeper the site is crawled & less pages end up in the sups with WN bouncing from 4-5-4
I would guess this is why they were indexed & not in sups, & now have returned to sups.

The most commonly accepted method of getting out of sups is getting deep links in this case you would need to build links to wn/forum
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Kirsty · WN Senior Member

Here's the link I was on about:

http://www.notsoboringlife.com/blogging/get-your-blog-out-of-the-google-supplemental-index/
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hawaii · WN Superstar

I agree with Neale about the deeplinks and OverlandAsia about robots.txt.

Also, take a look at the indexed URLs in the forums:
www
google.com/search?q=site%3Aworkingnomad.com%2Fforum%2F&num=100&filter=0

[intentionally de-linked the URLs in this post]

The profile.php pages have the title "Viewing profile :: The Working Nomad Forums". Too many pages with little content and identical titles. Because the prolific posters have many links to their profile pages (from each post), it sends a lot of link juice to those profile pages which do not redistribute that back to the forums well. You have thousands of pages, but a limited amount of link juice to distribute.

I would try blocking profile pages with the following robots.txt rule:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/profile.php
Or, change profile.php to add usernames and locations to the <title> elements. That would make every title element different and increase the keywords in the titles. It might be worth experimenting with. In addition to changing the title elements it would be helpful to also have the profile pages extract a list of that user's 25 latest threads that they have contributed to. That should redistribute PR from the profile pages back to threads (where the main content is).

Other non-important pages like this are getting indexed (not Supplemental) --
www
workingnomad.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=5&mark=topics

You can block those types with this:
Disallow: /forum/*&mark
(Google, Yahoo and MSN support wildcards)

Member list is also not keyword targeted content, so you can block it like this if desired:
Disallow: /forum/memberlist.php

Also, check out URLs with different parameters such as p, t, f, and c. For example:
/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4079 -- what does each parameter mean, and are any of them duplicating other parameters? Some forums have "thread view" and "post view" which duplicates content. Or even worse, extra parameters appended like /forum/viewtopic?p=1234&Ajax_Callback=FALSE. PHPbb doesn't have that specific example, but it might have others. A quick check shows that it has sortable lists which can create duplicate content:
www
google.com/search?q=site%3Aworkingnomad.com%2Fforum%2Fmemberlist.php

(Notice the &order=ASC parameter which means there is probably a version of the same content that is sorted differently.)

Look for URLs on each page and see if they should be blocked by robots.txt. For example, each post has a quote button that search engines are following:
www
google.com/search?q=site%3Aworkingnomad.com%2Fforum%2Fposting.php

A robots.txt file located in the root of the site will help focus the link juice that you have, and deep links will send more link juice to places where it isn't going. I would get deeplinks to category pages or other pages that link to many other pages (forum posts) so that the PR can be distributed...

From a quick look I would probably at least add this to robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/*&order
Disallow: /forum/*&mark
Disallow: /forum/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forum/privmsg.php
Disallow: /forum/posting.php

# optionally add the following line -- I would test it unless trying the PHP hack mentioned above
Disallow: /forum/profile.php

Check the number of indexed pages in Google before and after, keeping note of the number of Supplemental Results to see if it makes a difference.

You can be experimental with robots.txt without much risk. I've seen a 12,000 page ecommerce site get entirely blocked with robots.txt and recover within a week of it being removed. Just monitor it well...

Alternatively, convert to vBulletin with the vbSEO plugin. I think there is a script to import PHPbb into vBulletin. I think that vBulletin is much more SEO friendly than PHPbb. Because most of the forum is in the Supplementals you wouldn't have to worry too much about changing the URLs at this point as long as the old URLs send 404 headers.

Hope that helps...

Webby · WN Admin

thanks for all the info Hawaii, much appreciated
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Webby · WN Admin

I tried some of that code for this forum and will have to wait and see now if anything changes.

I am seeing quite a big increase in traffic on this site now, Google seems to like it again!
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