The forum and Google...

michaelab

michaelab

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Spend most of today hunting around on www.vbulletin.org to find out ways of getting Google to more effectively index the forums.

There are couple of great "hacks" there that do it but neither of the main ones worked for me - I did however, find a 3rd one that seems to be working beautifully :)

It's basically a PHP script that makes a pseudo HTML "version" of the forum which Google (and other spiders) can easily follow.

To see the output it gives go here:
http://www.zerogain.com/forum/archive/index.php

It isn't meant to look flash or have a particularly nice interface, just a way of having the forum linked in a way that Google handles better. Hopefully this will increase the visibility of the forum :)

BTW, a nice trick which I didn't know - if you want to find what entries Google has for your site enter the following search string

allinurl:www.yourdomain.com

replacing www.yourdomain.com with your domain of course!

FYI: the vBulletin "hack" I'm using is this one .

Michael.
 
Not sure if this either true or if it could be used here but, a friend of mine mentioned once that to get search engines to pick up your site MOre you could simply flood the background of the page with key words. So, just say we've a grey background here, assuming you have a way of editing it, you could use text of the same colour (therefore making it invisible) and flood it (copy and paste) with key words "Hifi" "stereo" "music" etc...

Not sure if there's anyway of aplying this here? Or if it's just b@ll@x to start with anyhow :)
 
Don't know if that's true or not but Google is pretty sohpisticated at spotting tricks like that and ignoring them.

Another reason why the archive listing is as simple as possible is so there's maximum content and minimum bullshit like styles, graphics etc that "dilute" the key words.

I'm going to give this system a month to see how it goes.

Michael.
 
Google is pretty clever. I never registered my webpage with google, or put any keywords in, yet it shows up when I search for it :)
 
If you flood the background with keywords you are more likely to get banned from Google as they are wise to tricks like that (or keywords in a tiny typeface).

Google don't take much account of keywords and titles etc but you are not making use of them at all. The keywords that you are using are "vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft" and the content is :-

"ZeroGain is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin. To visit the forum, go to http://zerogain.com/forum/ . To find out about vBulletin, go to http://www.vbulletin.com/ "
Click to expand...

That is probably the standard vbulletin blurb and is advertising themselves and not Zerogain unless you change it.

There are two ways to increase visibility on Google. The first is to get into other search directories, the best one being DMOZ or the Open Directory Project. I don't suppose what category that you are entered in matters that much but if you find a suitable Hifi category it may take ages to be approved as the whole directory (which feeds Google & Yahoo amongst others) is edited by hand. If you ask to be included in the Home Cinema category by adding url here inclusion will be much quicker as the I am the category editor.

The second thing that Google looks for are quality links from other sites. If all the members that had a home page were to put a link to the forum on it, that would increase exposure and would help the rise up the Google rage rankings.

I will start by putting a link on my own site
 
OK - just updated the meta-tags :)

Now, aswell as the ones mentioned it has:
"hifi,music,audio,digital,analogue,CD,SACD,LP,amplifier,speaker,DAC,AV"

..and also changed the Meta description.

Thanks for adding the link Ian! Will see what other categories there are at that DMOZ thing.

In the meantime, the PHP script I installed should improve things as by default Google won't follow the normal vBulletin links.

Michael.
 
Tony - I was going to mention these "archive" scripts to you but didn't get around to it yet.

The others two I found but which didn't work for me (allthough they seem to be the most widely used) are:

http://www.vbulletin.org/hacks/index.php?s=&action=showhack&hackid=843

and

http://www.vbulletin.org/hacks/index.php?s=&action=showhack&hackid=878

All 3 do roughly the same thing but the one I use has a slightly different technique which meant it worked for me where the others didn't. PM me if you need more details.

Michael.
 
Keywords now read :-

vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft,hifi,music,audio,digital,analogue,CD,SACD,LP,amplifier,speaker,DAC,AV
Click to expand...

Content now reads :-

ZeroGain is a discussion forum about HiFi and Music. To visit the forum, go to http://www.zerogain.com/forum/ .
Click to expand...

Title now reads :-

ZeroGain - powered by vBulletin
Click to expand...

The words should also start with the most important so the keywords should be changed to put hifi and AV at the front and dropping words like vbulletin and jelsoft completely.

Likewise the Title should be changed to something like "Zerogain - your premier online resource for hifi and AV related chat." I am no marketing man so tinker with the wording but you should use that line to tell people what happens here and not to publicize vbulletin.

The content line could also be usefully changed around to put the most important words first eg. Hifi and AV are discussed in the online forum at Zerogain as these are the likely search terms.
 
All 3 do roughly the same thing but the one I use has a slightly different technique which meant it worked for me where the others didn't.
Click to expand...

Seemed to work for me, now to wait and see if Google grabs any infoââ'¬Â¦ The one good thing about ezBoard (and honestly it was the only good thing) was that search engines picked stuff up with no help from me. http://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/archive/ is the result of this tweak. I may remove the parent forums from the display list once I figure out their forumid numbers as they are no help to a search engine.

I did the meta tags on the pfm forum a few days ago too, plus stick a robots.txt file up to stop the spiders sifting through irrelevant stuff - its a exclude list. Can't for the life of me remember which file I edited for the meta tags though! php code is still pretty alien to me (I know basic html, but that's my limit) so all I've been doing so far is searching the forums and doing stuff people have suggested ââ'¬â€œ I've managed not to break it so far! The vBulletin support forums really are excellent.

Tony.
 
I agree Tony - the vBulletin support forums really are superb. Changing the meta tags involved changing one of the templates in the admin control panel - can't remember which one of the top of my head.

BTW - I've replied in the "Web Browsers" thread over on PFM with some fixes I worked out for the couple of vBulletin/Firebird issues that were annoying me (position of online/offline icon and width of text boxes).

Incidentally Tony - it's not made totally obvious but you do need to have a link somewhere to http://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/archive/ because even though Google will index it, it won't show the results in any search pages unless there are links referring to it. Might be worth adding it to your home page. NB: you can't add it in a too subtle way - if you do things like ultra small text, 1 pixel images with the link, grey text on grey background etc. Google get rather upset and ban your site from their indeces ;)

Michael.
 
See Jim

What about a visit to Jim's World and learn about the black arts of the SEO? It is a good idea to spend a few weeks just looking - I'm sure you will pick up some good ideas that will not get you kicked out by Google.

Auric
 
i've never done anything clever regarding search engine submission, efficient use of meta tags, robot txt files etc. but type in "cyrus unofficial" into google, and i'm there - and ahead of the billy ray fan sites too !
 
Originally posted by Ian J
Have you been here and added the site details.

It's worth doing once a week until you are least in their database
Click to expand...
Yes - did it twice the other day (once for my homepage and once for the forum homepage). Once a week? Do they take any notice of how often you do it?

Michael.
 
Originally posted by michaelab
Once a week? Do they take any notice of how often you do it?
Click to expand...

Who knows, Google ranking is a black art but I have been told that once a week is acceptable but not to do it more than that.
 
Try adding this:

<META NAME="SEARCH ENGINES" CONTENT="AltaVista, AOL, Google, Yahoo, WebCrawler, Infoseek, InfoSpace, Mirago, OneSeek, Excite, HotBot, Lycos, LookSmart, Sapo, SearchUK, WebZone, UKindex, Mamma, UKPlus, MSN",>


Worked for my dads website.

GTM
 

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