FidoSysop said

I have had some problems with getting my SEO tweaked for simple press.

 

I would suggest you do a search as follows site:www.yourdomain.com and see what is displayed for your simple press forum posts. I have found that without using a meta description for the main forum pages will cause a bunch of junk to be indexed.

I did a google search for my site (www.aristotleprep.com) but instead of displaying any posts from forums, it just displays all crappy results except for the first one. Can you please suggest what should I do ?

Also I think in the meta description of any search result, usually the first line of the forum post is displayed, so if I set a meta description, will it display the same thing for every search result

P.S. – I tried attaching a screenshot to this post but it’s throwing Error 105 – Invalid file type error. I tried attaching jpg, png, gif formats but in vain and this has been happening since morning.

Yellow Swordfish said
OK guys- I have upped it to 200k

Thanks  🙂

Hmmm.. What WP Plugin are you using for your SEO? I just dumped AIO SEO for Platinum SEO and it’s much more configurable. Just guessing from what i am seeing, your blog articles / pages do not have a separate meta description for each page.

As for the forum pages i suggest you use the setup i screen capped earlier. It seems to work well for me.

FidoSysop said
Hmmm.. What WP Plugin are you using for your SEO? I just dumped AIO SEO for Platinum SEO and it’s much more configurable. Just guessing from what i am seeing, your blog articles / pages do not have a separate meta description for each page.

As for the forum pages i suggest you use the setup i screen capped earlier. It seems to work well for me.

At the moment, I am not using any SEO plugin because I’m using Ecwid shopping cart which has a conflict with SEO plugins. That is a real  pain in the ass . Will try the set up you gave and give you the feedback.

mann said

FidoSysop said
Hmmm.. What WP Plugin are you using for your SEO? I just dumped AIO SEO for Platinum SEO and it’s much more configurable. Just guessing from what i am seeing, your blog articles / pages do not have a separate meta description for each page.

As for the forum pages i suggest you use the setup i screen capped earlier. It seems to work well for me.

At the moment, I am not using any SEO plugin because I’m using Ecwid shopping cart which has a conflict with SEO plugins. That is a real  pain in the ass . Will try the set up you gave and give you the feedback.

OK. That should take care of your forum indexing anyway.

Brandon C said
I don’t have any experience with multisite but according to the plugin page info.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

There is a beta download that says

This release is not compatible with the new multisite feature of WordPress 3.0 yet. The plugin will remain inactive as long as this feature is enabled. If you are using this feature, try out the new Beta version which fully supports multisite mode as well as network activation!

If that doesn’t work maybe do a little googling and see if anyone has figured out how to use Google XML Sitemaps on multisite.

Generally speaking, how safe is it to use the beta version of a plugin ? Can the beta version of something be used on a live website ? The problem with the other sitemap tool I am using “Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps” is that it does not generate a sitemap for the simple-press. Simple press has its own plugin for generating sitemap but that will work only it the Google sitemap generator plugin is active which unfortunately I don’t have at the moment.

How safe is it to use beta? Impossible question but I would say it partly depends on the source. We use WP beta all the time. Actually I download the latest changes to WP every morning. We always use the SP beta on our live site and, in the case of V5 the alpha as well. Arnes Google Sitemap? I personally would probably trust that source enough but I can understand the hesitation.

My forum at www.digitalt.tv/forum also has nothing indexed in Google maybe after move from v4 to v5 I am not sure.

I have now installed Google XML Sitemap plugin but should I not see at least something indexed on Google even without this plugin? My posts are ranked pretty high and fast on Google.

I am using WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast which is popular and as far as I can tell I have not set anything up in there to prevent forum indexing.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-seo-by-yoast-simplepress-urls?replies=1 and http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-seo-by-yoast-remove-noindex-on-login-page?replies=3 seems also to indicate the issue. Any ideas or should I give up on WordPress Seo plugin?

disappeared? so they were there before?  nothing we do or dont do for that… but since all content is on a single wp page, seo stuff like yoast plugin wont even know they exist…  so google has to self discover… and we dont do anything to prevent self discovery…  but using a plugin like google xml sitemap is a very good way to explicitly tell google about the forum pages and is working well for users…

You might try going to Google Webmaster and making sure that your sitemap ( http://digitalt.tv/sitemap.xml )  is submitted and not showing any errors.

Brandon C said
You might try going to Google Webmaster and making sure that your sitemap ( http://digitalt.tv/sitemap.xml )  is submitted and not showing any errors.

Yes I have done that and it tells me there are no errors. It is reporting 1.829 of 2.861 indexed.

There are around 1020 forum pages in the sitemap so all of these seems to be ignored 

The author of the WordPress SEO plugin has also replied to http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-seo-by-yoast-remove-noindex-on-login-page?replies=3 I guess the should be no need to edit core files for SimpleForum pages to be indexed.

Not a very helpful answer was it? Then again – it was an oddly worded question to begin with.

I myself, am a total amateur when it comes to knowledge of SEO and the machinations of Google but have you checked all of your settings on the forum SEO panel and any options that Yoast adds to the actual forum WP page – assuming it does?

Not a SEO expert myself either. The settings in Simple Press Seo is the same as some user posted earlier in this thread. http://www.fidosysop.org/misc/sp-seo.jpg

 I have made a modification to my WP theme functions.php 

function wpseo_canonical_exclude( $canonical ) {
global $post;
if ( $post->ID == 1137) {
$canonical = false;
}
return $canonical;
}
add_filter( ‘wpseo_canonical’, ‘wpseo_canonical_exclude’ );

Should stop the WordPress Seo plugin canonical since Simple Forum does this already. Found that on the wordpress.org forums.

Will try waiting for some days then I think I will try disabling the WordPress SEO plugin and see what then happens.

That change you have made looks promising. Please do update us when you have some evidence.

5 days since I made some the changes and since then I have seen only 3 posts registered by google. Of those two are new posts made after the changes and one older post. I have also disabled the Yoast WP SEO plugin just to see if that makes any difference.

But I guess Google now must be seeing the posts since these 3 have been indexed. Just incredibly slow. I did also resend sitemap in webmaster tools and all other things have been indexed but Google is slow particular concerning the http://digitalt.tv/sitemap-misc.xml part with all the forum posts for some strange reason. Also Google Webmaster tools claim 33 urls in http://digitalt.tv/sitemap-misc.xml are indexed. But site:digitalt.tv/forum only returns 6 results.