SEO

Hi,

My SEO has been absolutely fantastic for the last few months and then tonight, I noticed that I hadn't seen the google bot on the forums for a while. I checked and it hasn't been on since the 17th march.

I haven't changed any settings, all previously indexed threads are still on google and still high ranked, but the last 7 days threads/articles havent been indexed at all.

I have had a look in the google tools and it says there are no problems, so I'm quite confused as to what could be wrong.

Is this "just one of those things" or can I fix it?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Dave.

Edit: I've just checked the sitemap logs and according to that the google bot has been on the forums and been active, yet nothing is indexed.

Edit2: Also, the main site urls weren't verified in the google webmaster tools section. They were verified months ago, so I don't know what happened there either

open the webmasters portal and see if your sitemap has any errors on it

Hi Brian,

I had the sitemap plugin installed but not enabled, so I had no sitemap. I have only just enabled it this evening to see if it would coax the bot back, so it's not been processed yet.

The only errors I have anywhere in the webmaster section are 16x http errors and 126 not found errors.

that's ok.... errors will almost always show up. sometimes the site will time out, or there's an old thread that got deleted in there that will show as a 404 for a bit.

once you get the sitemap installed and added to your webmasters portal, you should see some more activity

Thats the thing though Brian, our SEO has been excellent for months without any sitemap, thats partly why i didn't re-enable the sitemap plugin.

Oddly, even though the plugin was disabled, I can still see the SE bot activity logs

Anyone any ideas on this please?

The bot is coming and doing it's stuff, but none of the pages are ending up on google.

Previously, pages were showing up within a couple of hours. In the webmaster tools, it is still showing as the 17th as the last time the bot accessed the site, and only a handful of threads/articles have arrived on google.

All the older stuff is still there.

thanks

I think I may be on to something.

Apologies for bumping the thread again, but I think I may have found the problem.

I installed a Vbulletin plugin that gives a welcome message to guests, telling them to register, and the benefits of being a member etc.

I even found some info on these very forums about it and it said that it was best to have the message in the form of an image rather than text so that the text isn't seen as duplicates by the bot.

Anyway, it turns out that I installed that plugin on the 17th, and that is the last date that the google tools show that the bot successfully accessed my site.

I disabled the plugin and within a couple of hours, my latest articles have appeared on google.

There are still some things missing, and the webmaster tools still shows the 17th, but it seems that the plugin could be the culprit, or do you think it is just an odd coincidence?

Did you have it converted to an image, or just text before you removed it?

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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I had it up as a .png image.

That seems strange.

• Was it an image map? You it contained 1 or more links?
• Did you include it on all pages (forum display, show thread, etc)?
• Did you make any other changes at the same time, or just prior?
• Was the original welcome message generic, or did it contain keywords?

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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The image was clickable and it took the guest to the register page.

Yes, it was on all pages, that was the intention so that wherever the person came to the forum from, they would still see the notice

All other changes were made after that, when I noticed the bot hadn't been for a week or so.

The original message was the generic Vbulletin one.

I can't see how that would have any impact except positive.

What were the other changes?

The default welcome message was applied to all pages as well, or just the forum homepage in the beginning?

By the way, this is just an interruption in indexing progress, or you've seen a change in web visitors?

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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The default welcome message was at the vbulletin default, whatever that is - I hadn't done anything to it until I installed that plugin.

The other changes were me adding a sitemap, which I previously didn't have, but that was only a week or so after the bot hadn't been doing it's stuff.

I had a lot of meta keywords. maybe 30 or so, and a lot of them were variants of the same word, for example overclocking, overclocked, overclock, over-clock etc and they have been there since day 1 without google ever complaining about it, so anyway, I removed a lot of them.

I checked in the webmaster tools and both my forum and hompage were "unverified". I checked the server and the verification html file was still there for both. I re-uploaded the verification files and re-verified it, google accepted them and said I was verified again.

Since I removed the message, I am getting a huge amount of yahoo slurp spiders, 300 a day or more, maybe this is because of teh sitemap? The slurp spiders arent a problem, it's just something i noticed.

My traffic has gone up steadily, but since that message went up, I have seen a big increase in new members. My site relies heavily on google for articles getting hits, so if it was a choice between new members and google indexing, I would have to take the indexing I think

thanks for the help so far Joe

I wouldn't worry too much about it. But, let us know when you start to see more Googlebot activity on your site again.

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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It's weird, some of the articles that I mentioned that had taken a few days to be indexed have now disappeared from google completely. Things seem to be taking around 2 days to show up, and that's if they show up at all.

I wish I knew what it was so I could fix it :(