pages not getting updated on google with rewritten links

Hey guys, i have a pretty healthy forum going, about 100 members on at a given time and over 23k posts. I have a bunch of my urls indexed by google, but not with the new urls. yahoo seems to be doing it fine. i have a google site map and google analytics set up. Let me know your thoughts or if i should change rewrite settings etc. my site is ABADSS Free to Air FTA DSS Forum

abadss.com - Yahoo! Search Results

site:abadss.com - Google Search

I have similar problem, I had 13K+ pages indexed in google 3 weeks ago but now only 191 are visible in index... I am not sure what is happening.

well i still have a ton indexed by google, 26k, but they aren't the rewritten links, they are all the old style

Some suggestions to improve your site for better rankings:

• kill some meta keywords. 10-15 is ideal. Be specific, and don't overlap.
• change your style sheet from embedded to linked. there's an option to do so in the vB options dropdown in the ACP
• perform an image replacement technique on this image: http://www.abadss.com/aquateen/misc/logo.jpg you need an h1 in there. Add an h2 to this one: http://www.abadss.com/aquateen/misc/toptabs.jpg using the same method. This will help tremendously. Remember, SE's can't READ images.
  • mezzoblue *§* revised image replacement
• Change your tabs for your menu options.
  • http://www.abadss.com/aquateen/misc/images/tabs_01.gif For example, google cannot read that this is the pathway to the "forums".
  • Use the orange rounded background as a background image, and then actually use text to write the word "Forums" out above it. You can style it with CSS to make it look 100% identical.
  • This goes for all your nav buttons that are images.
• validate and fix your code on all your pages. you have a TON of errors. Result for http://www.abadss.com/forum/ - W3C Markup Validator
  • you have used a template that like most vB templates, are made by designers, and not web seo pro's, nor care about meeting validity. Google cares: Webmaster Help Center
    - What are Google's design and technical guidelines?
• create a robots.txt file here: http://www.abadss.com/robots.txt
  • Search these forums for examples, as there are a ton floating around this board.
• Due to the massive amount of forums you have, you are giving away a lot of page rank. Consider making the Downloads category only have one forum in it, and make the rest subforums that do not display on the homepage. They will still get indexed from the seconday page, and frankly, simple downloads with out much text involved really won't help you gain rank.
• Consider removing the links to profiles on the home page of "who's online". If you have 100 members on, that's 100 links to no where that is hurting you. google encourages fewer than 100 links per page. With your massive amount of topics and forums, that should be the ones getting the links, not to the users.
  • Webmaster Help Center
    - What are Google's design and technical guidelines?

That should keep you busy for a while

i'm also not seeing that you have a sitemap installed.

neither of these links work...

http://www.abadss.com/sitemap_1.xml.gz
http://www.abadss.com/sitemap_1.xml
http://www.abadss.com/index_sitemap.xml
http://www.abadss.com/index_sitemap.xml.gz

thanks guys, i appreacite you checking this out for me. will give a full report once done!

Originally Posted by Michael

He does have vBSEO Sitemap installed;
vBSEO Google / Yahoo Sitemap for vBulletin

perhaps it's installed, but the sitemap file itself doesn't seem to exist.

ok, i looked into it about the sitemap. i have it installed since 4/30 and it looks like it is just in the forum directory, my forum dir is ABADSS Free to Air FTA DSS Forum - FREE SATELLITE FTA HELP. do i need to alter something for this to work out right or can it stay in the forum directory. my vbseo log file show that it has been downloaded nearly every day since 4/30. http://www.abadss.com/forum/sitemap_index.xml.gz

Originally Posted by briansol

i'm also not seeing that you have a sitemap installed.

neither of these links work...

http://www.abadss.com/sitemap_1.xml.gz
http://www.abadss.com/sitemap_1.xml
http://www.abadss.com/index_sitemap.xml
http://www.abadss.com/index_sitemap.xml.gz

i just realized that i had it backwards....

sitemap_index, not index_sitemap

yea it looks like it is genertating regularly. does it need to be in my root directory or is it fine that it is in the forum directory?

doesn't matter where, so long as you submit it correctly to google in your webmaster account if yuo want to track it.

Originally Posted by briansol

Some suggestions to improve your site for better rankings:

• change your style sheet from embedded to linked. there's an option to do so in the vBulletin options dropdown in the ACP

for this one, the only thing i found like this was below:

Store CSS Stylesheets as Files?
If you would like to store the CSS stylesheet for each style as a file, you must ensure that you have a directory called 'vbulletin_css' inside the 'clientscript' folder, and that the web server has permission to write and delete files within that directory.
Yes No

is this what you are talking about?