Please Critique My Site - No Search Results

Hello; I was told to post here (referring thread)

My site is FreebiesRGreat - The Newest Freebies, Deals, Sweepstakes, Coupons & More!

I installed VBSEO back in early May hoping to increase my search rankings in google. Our site already was decent, but I wanted better rankings and visibility. Since then, we still haven't seen any results. We've left the default configuration basically.

If you put into google "freebiesrgreat" for example without the quotes, we only have one link which is the top one. If you do a site:freebiesrgreat.com, google isn't indexing any threads whatsoever, just forums...which still are not visible under other search criteria.

Something is wrong clearly. We have alot of content and posts per day, and nothing shows up in google. I really need some help with this one.

Since your site uses www's, you need to include that in your site parameters.

site:www.freebiesrgreat.com - Google Search

These results are not in any particular order, and a few pages in , you can clearly see there are a ton of threads indexed in google with the vbseo urls.


You are in a VERY tough niche, having the competition being a few of the largest forums on the net, and it's a niche that content expires, sometimes in just a few days.

What do you use for tracking? I don't see an analytics code snippit on your site. Without it, it's really impossible to say it's not working for you or not, as you aren't tracking web search visits.
Google analytics is free and vbseo offers simple integration of it (just enter your account id into the CP)


You also don't seem to have a sitemap. You should download and install that from the downloads area, and submit the sitemap to google.com/webmasters tool area.

Thank you for your response. Those threads with www are from 2009-2010..they are very old. We have tons of fresh threads posted daily, so those are not being picked up either. We do use google analytics, not sure why you don't see that. I'm not even sure what other information I could offer you or where to go from here. We don't have any sort of robots.txt file on the webserver... I'm just lost You can see that very little is coming from search engines, just direct traffic

Also, here is something interesting I found in my webmaster tools? Why are there crawl errors (42,000+) and those all look like older links before my SEO implementation? There's gotta be something wrong

None of those urls are vbseo'ed, as you can clearly see.

You need to install our sitemap tool and get that sitemap with the vbseo;ed urls into your webmaster tools account ASAP.

I did earlier...install the sitemap generator and made a sitemap. Then sent it to google through webmaster tools. I hope that helps. I just don't understand how even without the sitemap, things werent being properly vbseo'd since I installed back in May.

It can take a few for webmaster tools to update. It is not real time.

Now I have Aug 4th Crawl errors... the bots are obviously still crawling old pages. Pages that don't even exist anymore related to showthread.php?blahblah... hows this even possible if the links are all seo'd?

shwothread urls will return a 301 and go to the new vbseo'ed url. Nothing seems wrong on your site. It just takes time. Google will eventually pick up on it.

but they don't that's what I'm saying... If I click on all those, they goto a invalid link notify web master msg. They don't redirect??

Hello Jon,

Are those URLs vB-friendly URLs? or vB-native URLs? (showthread.php?t=123 vs. showthread.php?123-Random-title).

If they are all vB-native URLs, they should redirect automatically to vBSEO'ed format. If not, then you might require a custom ruleset to redirect all of those pages to vBSEO'ed URLs.

Please let us know!

They are all the t=123 or p=123, so I guess that would be native? They are the default links that come with vb or in vb code... I dont know.

Here is a recent crawl error for example showing up in my webmaster tools along with the other 42,000 of them. Try clicking on it. http://www.freebiesrgreat.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13951

Hello Jon,

It looks like that those URLs belong to threads that don't exist anymore. As you can see here: Sweepstakes Questions/Tips/Advice Thread - FreebiesRGreat - The Newest Freebies, Deals, Sweepstakes, Coupons & More! vB-native URLs are redirecting correctly to their new location, so that it is normal to see those 404 crawling errors.

hmm, now what about tags? Google bots always hang out in our expired forum which they don't have access to anyways, but you can see them on who's online. Should we disable tags completlely? It seems as though they are searching by these tags and trying to access 2009-2010 data/threads which is part of the problem.

if you look at this who's online, clearly there is something wrong. Google bots consistently try to acess things and get error messages. In this screenshot, the bot is getting an error message in that particular forum which is opened to GUESTS. So I logged onto on from my computer as a guest and accessed that forum. I got into that forum fine. So why is google getting an error message?