Google caching of phpbb forum with advanced mod rewrite

dcz

Sorry I it was not clear, mod release will soon be reorganized Wink

And no need for more, you'll avoid all dupes with the full robots.txt suggested.

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arch stanton · PR1 Joined: 04 Oct 2006 Posts: 116

dcz, my PR seems to have disappeared. It was PR 3, now PR0. I've seen it go to 0 before but usually only temporarily. It has been like this for a few days now. Sad

But I do still have incoming links, including dmoz, and if anything the links have increased. Could it be anything to do with my sitemap being on /forum/ rather than on the homepage?

The reason I did this is that I couldn't get the mod to work properly when it was set for the homepage rather than /forum/, I got a database error.

dcz

Well it looks like -http://www.gladtalk.co.uk/forum/index.php still has a PR3, it's http://www.gladtalk.co.uk/forum/ not to be ranked yet.

Then, I am not sure about the sitemap thing. Could you elaborate ?

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arch stanton · PR1 Joined: 04 Oct 2006 Posts: 116

Well, the good news is that the mod-rewrite changes are starting to filter through, i.e. some pages with friendly URLs are starting to show up on the index.

The very, very bad news is that some of my most popular pages are no longer indexed or cached and some rival sites have suddenly appeared well above mine on searches where mine was top or near top. Sad

I'm hoping this is temporary! The sitemap didn't start working properly until 9 December, I believe. Will the fact I had "forum/post" missing from my robots.txt for a while affect rankings for a time as well because of dupe posts?

dcz

The redirection should help out to get the same position while migrating in SERPS, but this is the kind of thing that require a instant switch, if you mess up for some days, it will slower down the process a bit, but everything should go back top normal.

On this site again, the redirection of both forums URLs was performed without a single loss of visitors, so.

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arch stanton · PR1 Joined: 04 Oct 2006 Posts: 116

dcz

Just wait.

If the newly forbidden by robots.txt files where still in cache, the chances are great it won't be too bad, if they where already out of cache, then, the search engine will still figure out these page are now located under a new url, so it won't be as starting from scratch, but it can take a bit more time.

Usually, the Google sitemaps module needs a month with PR 3 on index to have Google index all the forum.

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arch stanton · PR1 Joined: 04 Oct 2006 Posts: 116

dcz

Well I get 301 with and without gunzip handling, the only possible messy cause here : redir without Gunzip and with it

The same with http/1.0 so I guess everything is fine, what is the url you tested ?

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arch stanton · PR1 Joined: 04 Oct 2006 Posts: 116

dcz

Ho I see now, how do you redirect gladetalk.org.uk to gladetalk.co.uk ?

It's the only messy redirection. We need to fix that.

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arch stanton · PR1 Joined: 04 Oct 2006 Posts: 116

dcz

The 302 is definitely causing troubles.

To solve this, you should either set gladetalk.org.uk's DNS to match gladtalk.co.uk direcrtly, and implement (if not already done) the www prefix redirection (version n°2), or set up the redirection from gladetalk.org.uk's web space (ftp), if so tell me, I'll tell you how to do it Wink

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It's very important, 302 are really bad SEO wise in such cases, as the original URL will be the one taken into account by SEs.

arch stanton · PR1 Joined: 04 Oct 2006 Posts: 116

dcz

well, at this stage, forwarding all to a single page could be better, but it's still not a good solution.

Can't you set the gladetalk.co.uk VHOST to accept as well gladetalk.org.uk, then set gladetalk.org.uk's dns to make it work where gladetalk.co.uk is installed (basically a full install of both domain on the same web space) ?

Because the ww prefix redirection is genuine 301, will thus http 301 redirect gladetalk.org.uk/.*. to gladetalk.co.uk/*.* and it's required anyway to make sure about the www prefix, so ...

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