SEO

Let's keep an eye on it. But the key thing is that your traffic is still up.

It's not likely that a welcome message improvement would cause any negative effect.

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Hi,

Sorry to bump this, but I'm a bit worried about it now.

It's been a couple of months since this started, so it appears to not be a blip.

Googlebot regularly crawls my forums but the stuff isn't showing up in searches for days, often over a week.

I did an experiment today and posted a news article that wasn't indexed anywhere else on google that I could see, but just to be sure, I changed the title of my story slightly. Around an hour later, there were a few other sites with the same story showing up
, yet mine was nowhere to be seen, but the digg page for my article was there.

I have sitemaps installed, webmaster tools isn't showing any errors and the forums are xhtml validated - In fact, everything seems to be running well apart from this.

I can't understand how this is happening because the forums aren't full of junk, but articles, guides and reviews.

Would anyone like to help me out and see if there is something obvious that I've overlooked please?

Any help would be much appreciated

thanks

Dave.

Duplicate content?

are you re-posting other articles all the time?

This is my site, all the content is 100% original and only posted once, but I do have an rss news feed forum which posts live newsfeeds from other tech sites, but I havent seen any duplicates and I had that forum up and running long before google slowed down.

Other than that, I'm pretty careful about duplicates (unless I've missed something obvious).

I've just checked webmaster tools and google last indexed the forums on the 25th, previously it was the 20th.

1) move the style sheet to file system
2) make Overclocking Guides, Overclocking, Hardware & General PC Help. your top forum. You have 3 before it that really have nothing to do with your topic. Content up top = more weight in serps. Those should be down low.
3) validate your homepage. you have 3 javascript bugs too
YAHOO is not defined
http://www.clunk.org.uk/forums/clien...lobal.js?v=370
Line 11
vBulletin has no properties
http://www.clunk.org.uk/forums/clien..._menu.js?v=370
Line 11
probably a vBa thing...

4) create a homepage alias so that you can't access your forum via
clunk.org.uk/index.php
or
clunk.org.uk/index.php?
or
clunk.org.uk/
or
clunk.org.uk/index.php?some=1&thing=2

without redirecting to just ./ like it should. there's an option in vbseo for this. vBa might over-write it.. i don't know... i never liked that thing and IMO, it's pretty worthless... but that's your call. To me, your entire homepage is duplicate content of your forums. Why not just put the forums in root and have a small featured post box?

5) use yahoo remote scripts. saves bandwidth and most likely, they will be cached by new users (from visiting other sites, etc) so the site will load faster for users

6) incorporate h1 and h2 tags for threads. do a search on here... there's a bunch of threads on this.

7) keyword your forum descriptions. turn "Anything Related to Graphics Cards Goes Here!" into something like "agp to pci-e x16, directx10, nvidia to voodoo chip set graphics cards discussions". Obviously, come up with something more creative. Don't stuff it... make it logical, but 'name drop' some key words.

8) lose the annoucement **********We Are Looking For Forum Sponsors!********** If you're using smart sitemap weight, annoucemnts get more weight (if i'm not mistaken) than normal threads. make a small link in the footer to your advertising media kit, or a link under your banner when you get one. You can make a nice simple page just like i outlined here: Create your own Privacy Policy (using vb templates) obviously replacing the privacy policy stuff with your media kit.
this is what i whipped up. rob it if you wish. Advertiser Media Kit - HondaSwap Forums

9) lose the bookmarks. Do it per thread or not at all. Having them per post effectively adds 20 lines of html per post. on 20 posts per page, thats 400 lines of useless duplication.

10) your specs popups maybe be hurting you a little.... it might look like stuffing.
with styles off (as google sees it) it's hard to actually find the post content... and thats what's hurting you the most with these. Convenient for your niche, i'd agree... but might be hurting your seo somewhat. something to consider.
see screen shot.

Attached Thumbnails

 

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Wow, thanks Brian

There are a few points that I can fix right away, the others, I will have to work through a bit slower as they are new to me.

I have done this, I'm taking your word for it as I don't know why it needs to be done

This is interesting, I never knew this. The reviews section is actually our biggest source of traffic by quite a lot and I want to keep that close to the top. I'll adjust the order of the others now.

This is where I don't know how to fix the errors, but I will find out.

Like this?




Edit: setting the above in VBSEO really slows down the forums

I do agree about VBA not serving any real purpose, and it is going to be replaced very soon with a proper website. As a side note, we had VBA in the same config when the SEO was at it's fastest

This is something I need to read up on, I haven't heard of it before :embarrassed:

I need to read up on this too :embarrassed:

Brilliant! - I would never have thought of that, and certainly would never have figured that google would pick up on those titles.

I have dumped the announcement. Again, I had no idea that this kind of thing impacted on google. Thanks for the link, I will have a good read of that.

Is there a way to keep those icons visible, but make them only appear in the first post of the thread? I have already made them so that they bookmark the thread rather than each post.

I see what you mean about this, but we really need this because without it, people tend to put their system specs in their sigs and then people with sigs turned off can't see the specs and then they don't bother posting etc.

I have set the user profile fields to not be searchable on the members list and to not show on the members list. I'm not sure if it is relevant, but it kind of made sense in my head

Thanks again for the help Brian, much appreciated

Dave

5) this is a vb option in the general options. just select the radio box for remote.

10) wrap it in a template conditional.
<if condition="$show['member']">
code
</if>

members still get the positive site usage... google/guests won't see it to flood.