JohnS0N wrote:Hello, I have something similiar like this already, but it is not the problem. Please look here and you will see what I'm talking about. The titles work but the description is always the same

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www ... N&filter=0

Your generated source looks fine, but you have lots of pages in Google's private gulag, known as "Supplementary Results." There pages languish, untouched by their spiders for months or years. I recently reported hope of escape, but later results indicate my attempt to extract pages from this dead zone have proven fruitless.

All I can do is mourn the loss and take comfort that my site's more recent entrants have avoided Google's page purgatory.

HB wrote:

JohnS0N wrote:Hello, I have something similiar like this already, but it is not the problem. Please look here and you will see what I'm talking about. The titles work but the description is always the same

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www ... N&filter=0

Your generated source looks fine, but you have lots of pages in Google's private gulag, known as "Supplementary Results." There pages languish, untouched by their spiders for months or years. I recently reported hope of escape, but later results indicate my attempt to extract pages from this dead zone have proven fruitless.

All I can do is mourn the loss and take comfort that my site's more recent entrants have avoided Google's page purgatory.

I think I have somehow found a solution for this. Google takes the description from its cache. So what we have to do is recache all the pages, right? But google doesn't allow this or has no option for it. So I had the idea to rename my "forum" folder to "forums" I think it will work, because the urls all will seem to be new now and google will cache them again. Still I have a problem, look at this description, this is a google cache of one of my webpages;

How do i develop my calouses? -< TITLE
Guitar Forum :: General Chatter :: How do i develop my calouses? -< DESCRIPTION

Code: Select all

www.guitartrade.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=79872

- 37k - 9 Mar 2007 -

Google takes the description out from my title of the forum! That's bad again! I need the description to be taken out of the body post!

JohnS0N wrote:So I had the idea to rename my "forum" folder to "forums" I think it will work, because the urls all will seem to be new now and google will cache them again.

I would not do that. Google will see them as dupes and penalize their pagerank.

... Google takes the description out from my title of the forum! That's bad again! I need the description to be taken out of the body post!

If there are no search keywords (e.Google site:www.mysite.com), the results page displays the meta description tag contents, otherwise its best guess of the beginning of the page. The meta keywords mod will set them explicitly. FWIW, according to what I've read, many believe the meta keywords are of no (or very, very) limited importance.

Do not change your forum folder name without redirecting the older folder to the new one, or you'll loose all your indexing !!!

As well, in you case, you should not even change it, forum/ is fine, and already well known by bots.

What HB was saying is the HTTP 301 redirect will help out getting out of the supplemental results.

But you don't need to change your folder name for this, you'd better install one of the phpBB SEO mod rewrite and then redirect vanilla URL to the rewritten ones.

Now it seems you moved your form from the forum/ folder to root, this as well need proper redirecting.

Please proceed carefully when modifying your URLs or you'll really run into SEO problems.

The proper redirecting method with mod_rewrite to redirect forum/*.* => root is :

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^forum/(.*)$ /$1 [QSA,L,R=301]

in your domain root's .htaccess.

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dcz wrote:What HB was saying is the HTTP 301 redirect will help out getting out of the supplemental results.

Those early results were wishful thinking on my part. Google has since realized the new URLs and the condemned content in the SR are in fact the same. Google's verdict: "Back to the SR jail for you!"

Oh well, live and learn. I don't know why they got in the SR to start with, but I think the plethora of dupes in my site's first year are to blame. All recent threads have gone into the main index.

[off topic] Let's wait a week before we conclude on the supplemental. It's possible things will change, because when I migrated phpBB SEO, all redirected links went in the ommitted results (not the suplemental I'm aware) for like a week and came back to the main ones.

It just looked like the new urls needed to be re-cached once to go up in the main index.

I was able to browse up to the 938th results to reach the omitted : http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www ... t=990&sa=N

and by the way, there is only a few more brows-able : http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www ... N&filter=0 as the listing stops at the 1000th listed page. And no supplemental listing.

Did not see any old url or duplicate either, looks all fine to me, but it could be because we use different data centers.

Let's see how it goes.

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Well I did redirect all the forum to .root. We'll see how it goes. Some results are perfect when I search for my site and google indexes em great. But those are only about 10 of 1000+ pages.

How much does php to html url rewriting help in seo today really?

A lot, despite many will claim regular url with few vars are well indexed.

Some will argue phpBB.com is very well indexed and does not even get rid of SID, my point is, this is true, but if you're willing to wait until you've got PR9 to be well indexed, you'll have to wait for long

Really, mod rewrite still is a powerful SEO, it will help out for indexing, building PageRank and PageRank transmission, this is for sure.

SEO is mostly a matter of time, time to get indexed and ranked, mod rewrite is the kind of technique that will make you save a lot of time.

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What about linking? Do you have any advice on that? I've submited my site to about 500 directories, spent many many hours doing this... and if I search "link:www.guitartrade.org" not a single site shows up as linking back to me. Although I am indexed in many directories such as dmoz.org etc...

Well, we're a bit off topic here.

Yahoo shows 125, you can have a snapshot on our link popularity checker for msn Google and yahoo at once.

I suggest you start reading a bit in the google forums to find out more about how backlinks are taken into account and so on

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