I saw googlebot today! Guess you can ignore this thread.

sure…

thanks for the update….

Ok, so I mentioned I saw googlebot back at my site and soon after the number of indexed pages I had went up. I checked with google and all of my individual threads were indeed indexed. However yesterday I checked again and all of those pages are no longer indexed for me, all that is showing up is the main page /forum/.

I don’t mean to bug you if this is something typical and I’m simply being impatient, but I’d rather be safe than sorry as this forum will be the bulk of the content of my site moving forward. Any ideas as to anything that I need to check or do? I had W3 cache enabled but after reading up in these forums I found out that it’s not effective for SP. Was it possible that having it enabled had anything to do with my issue? Should I resubmit my forum page to be indexed again? I just did so the other day and that was right before they got indexed.

I’m really digging SP and am ecstatic that I found something that works so well and integrates so easily, but getting these threads indexed is a major priority for me. Thanks.

yes it could be… since the cache may have been serving the same page over and over to the bot and thus it removed for duplicate content…

have you actually checked your sitemap generated file and ensured your topics were in there?  and in the wp google xml sitemap plugin (not the sp one), manually rebuild the sitemap and just ensure there are no errors…

I’m really not too familiar with sitemaps, I’m learning as I go. Would I check the sitemap through my ftp server and just look at the file itself? And rebuilding the sitemap I’d through the WP admin section?

Ok, just checked the sitemap through the WP admin section and I do see all the forum threads.

Ok, I’m sure I’m just being impatient again, but like I said indexing the threads is pretty important so until I see them in google, I’m going to be a bit nervous. Thanks again.

okay, so no issue with the wp plugin notifying google?  lets just see what happens… these are NOT private forums, right?

No sir, my forum is not private.

Nothing showing up in google yet, will let you know when that changes.

SEO can be quite a chore..

And SP works quite well getting indexed for me at www.fidosysop.org

Looking at: http://ichartpennystocks.com/forum/otc-otcbb-pink-sheets-and-over-the-counter-bulletin-boards/ecpn-el-captain-precious-metals-inc-otc-bulletin-boards/ It appears the total text length exceeds the standards. While Google might index this line, though i highly doubt it, Bing will not.

Here is an article with general WordPress SEO Tips, Of course it does not cover SimplePress but since SP follows WordPress it’s a decent guide.

Looking at a view source of your home page AIO SEO looks on as far as the home description and keywords. You might be able to tinker with the site name in WordPress > General Settings and possibly drop “the best” from Penny stock forum. This will give you more total line length for your other pages. I have mine just saying the domain fidosysop.org. That way AIO will just add that as the site name to any other pages other than the home.

I will also take a few SP SEO screen grabs of my sp setup and post it here for a comparison.

Doc

OK, Simon.. Here is a screen grab of my SEO settings.

Another thing you might want to consider is setting up a feed at Google’s Feedburner. Once a feed from your forums is set up, you can use the Publicize feature to auto tweet posts from your board. That’s another channel of visibility.

Ok, thanks for that reply fido. I copied your SEO settings and submitted to feedburner, thank you. I also got rid of the best part in my title. I’m not about the length of the URLs, that would suck if that was my problem, but for now not even the main forum page is being indexed.

What’s weird is that when I first submitted the sitemap, I saw googlebot and he indeed was scanning my forum, and soon after I saw all the forum pages on google. Next day I checked again and all were gone. Now I’m stuck with everything being indexed except the forum. I’ve resubmitted and saw googlebot back again, but he never checks my forum pages at all. Not sure why, but he does not like them for some reason.

Uh oh! Googlebot is now back and scanning my forum pages! We’ll see if they stick this time. Thanks again to the two of your for your assistance. The effort is much appreciated, and if this works out, then the results are icing on the cake.

Another thing to consider is that dreaded Google Panda.

It has wrecked many sites search placement. Google’s algorithm favors certain things, and penalizes others. It could even be what your site represents. I have a critic site that Panda literately swept clean from Googles index, lost a ton of deep links too. This is a push by Google to sell more ads!

There are at least two other Google bots that frequent sites where the Google bot has been seen. They are usually not identified as a bot either. There is the adsense bot that checks your sites content. Then there is the Rate Limited Proxy Bot that checks the quality of your sites content. That one i believe is Google Panda!

What are you doing with Bing? Have you submitted your site to Bing webmaster tools and added a sitemap? Bing is being way to picky what they index, in my personal opinion anyway.

A good WordPress plugin called Visitor Maps and Who’s Online that’s good to click an IP for a look up. Also a very good companion plugin called Visitor Maps Extended Referer Field. That one has the ability to block abusive IP’s but best of all shows any referrers. I use both of these.

Best wishes for your site.

Doc