FIATForum.com Progress Report

Ok, just installed the IIS version of this today.

Stats currently stand at:
Threads: 60,158, Posts: 706,320, Members: 15,675

Search Engines:
Google: 31,700
Hotbot: 0
MSN: 96
Yahoo: 94,800

Will be working on some more SEO'ing over the coming days/weeks - but for now, let the "botting" begin

Beautiful Website!

I like the modifications you've made to the navbar, login form etc. - Check out the relevant replacements feature here: I would add some RR's per forum/thread with titles in H1... If you want to keep it tidy, the nav element can be assigned an H1 tag while manipulating the size via CSS.

Cheers!

Arent the thread and forum status icons taken from the vBulletin.org skin?

1 week update:

Google: 649
Hotbot: 502
MSN: 61
Yahoo: 88,000

With Google being the most scary! Almost all links dropped, the 301's seemed to have not worked. Hardly anything new indexed, sitebot quite active, though just seems to be ignoring it.... hmmm...

Michael: They were from an icon pack I downloaded, fitted nicely with the other colour scheme

Ok, next week up - things looking better than last week

Google: 868
Hotbot: 864
MSN: 2,028
Yahoo: 88,400

UP
DOWN
UP (But still lower than originally)

One issue I have now though is the CPU processes are going through the roof - whereas before I was on about 30% max, I'm now regularly hitting 80%!! This could be due to the extra search engine traffic however, as they are really hitting the site hard!

Don't be scared. It's normal.

You WILL see a drop, as it takes time to re-spider the site.

You WILL take a traffic hit for a little while, but the long-run gains are well worth it.

If it's any consolation, google is now up to 982 lol...

ALL my old links have now been dropped, and Google has started to follow the rules in my robots.txt too, so everything is being streamlined.

One thing puzzled me though, I thought the idea of the 301 redirects was to stop the initial pagedrop, and just get the search engines to edit their database?

An http 301 header means "Permanently moved; follow to new link, update, and remove old link" in normal english.

The problem is that the "update" part of it is NOT instant. google removes before it adds in the new ones.

the main reason for 301's is to redirect showtopic.php?t=123 to your new url, /123-some-title/ so your old links won't die.

Ok, the next Sunday's update... and changes are afoot

Google: 10,300
Hotbot: 999
MSN: 1,255
Yahoo: 93,200

So Google has finally started to pick up the new formats, but still way down on originally. Yahoo hasn't yet honoured my robots.txt, so I expect a lot of results to drop when it starts to do that.

I originally had my print thread's rewritten (which Yahoo catalogued), but I have now turned this off, though links still work (I would have expected them to redirect to the original printthread) - so I have made a new entry in the httd.ini file to redirect 301 to printthread.php, and then put printthread.php in the robots deny.

The server load is now though really starting to bother me, it's in short bursts, but usually hit maybe 50% max, now regularly it hits over 80% (this is a dual xeon!)

Would really like a counter implemented at the bottom of the page to show total execution time...

This is going to through the results a bit, but now un-rewritten the showpost.php and added the rel="nofollow" tags.

Just checked Google too, and out of the new 10k+ links, only 554 are vbSEO'd..... hmmm....

Add showpost.php to your robots.txt exclusions too, if you haven't already.

Waaaaay ahead of you, boss

So my weekly update again... and....

BIG NEWS!

Let's get the figures:

Google: 77,800!!
Hotbot: (Error)
MSN: 845
Yahoo: 97,300

My god! This is fantastic Of those 77k threads, 67k are vbseo'd - a lot of the remaining ones are my photo gallery and classfieds (which are excluded from vbseo - but still submitted using the sitemap).

As you will have been following, I have "robot denied" most pages, only focusing on the forum listings and thread display pages - as I only have 62,790 threads - it would seem that most of them are now indexed

Indeed, my sitemap has 92,936 urls in it (including the gallery and classifieds) so I'm pretty much almost there to having my complete site in Google

So for anyone reading - it would appear that this program really does work. And just to keep note, all my steps were:

Installed vbSEO (rewriting just the showthread and forumdisplay)
Installed vbSEO sitemap
Added the "< h1 >" changes suggested by t2dm
Setup robots.txt to deny everything except the above and archive

And then just sat back and waited..... it's been suggested I do the RR's, but I think they look ugly, so not so fond of that idea - though it's something I will look into (now the indexing is done, I need to look at serps etc).

Thank you vbSEO

Well BenFF - the waiting is definitely the most difficult part of the process. But, it looks like it certainly paid off for you - you've got your SEO just rewards! Congratulations.

It's up to 79,200 now! So thats the (easy?) part done, now I need to start optimising for more keyword searches.

I know everyone talks about the RR's - but I personally think they look quite ugly ... any other alternate tips?