for just the simple press stuff or the whole site?  are you using an seo plugin for wp?

I am not using a seo plugin. Every time I try to, it jacks the site.

I don’t need link-building and that kind of thing.  My site is well-established and in fact, I used to be on top my category.

What happened is I suffered some sabotage. Someone with access to the google webmaster told google not to crawl my site. This went on for almost a year before I noticed!  As a result, my traffic dropped by close to 70%! I am now trying to regain my status. 

My site is large, and all the content is original so I think if I can get everything set correctly, I will climb back up.

I also switched from bbpress to simple:press, which changed the url’s for my old boards, which were completely indexed. I knew this would happen – I am looking to consolidate loss and set up for the future.

Unfortunately, google is not indexing the new forum very quickly…or at all? I am actually losing indexed pages at this point and don’t know why.

I load the sitemap and look at it and it seems BIZARRE to me. Obscure pages in the forum (there are 700K posts in the forum) are weighted at 80% / daily – this makes no sense to me, but may be normal? I really have not idea.

I am also struggling to do basic things like set up google authorship. What I am good at is creating content…I would like to get back to it, but have been pissin’ into the wind for a year, due to the sabotage and really, desperately want to get the back end of the site properly configured.

I have a page rank of 4. I was climbing steadily for years until someone went in and unplugged me. So the answer is – I need general, basic wp seo and hopefully someone who is also familiar with simple:press as getting the forum indexed is very important.

As it is, I am not at all confident things are set up correctly and after what I’ve been through over the last year…well as hard as I work, I’d like to know I am not held back by some stupid error.

so if not using a seo plugin, that could be part of your problem… by default, simple press does not create a sitemap… but for a couple of wp plugins that create a sitemap, we can add our stuff… otherwise, you are relying on google to self discover the forum and crawl all the urls…

I would recommend either the google xlm sitemap plugin or wordpress seo for two that we work with… soon the all in one seo will get sitemaps too…

Oh, I am sorry. I misunderstood. I do have the google xml sitemap thing installed and have submitted a sitemap to google.  I thought you meant something like this: http://wordpress.org/plugins/click-go-seo/

I’ve just figured out the authorship problem so I am down to making sure the forum gets indexed. 

My sitemap test free from errors. It’s possible I don’t have a problem, but I would like to be assured of that. Because google is subtracting rather adding urls.

This is what I am dealing with / trying to fix:

It’s just so sad (if you’re me).

So the sitemap looks odd to me. Why are these obscure pages rated 80% and “daily”. I don’t have it set that way in wp.

So does the sitemap look normal/correct?

so next question then… are you using our google xml sitemap plugin too?  and if so, what are you settings for it?  ie frequency…

Sorry I am slow.

Yes, I am using your sitemap plug in. It’s set to run daily.

Thanks.

I don’t really do SEO – you need Steve for that. He is away all day today I am afraid but I am sure he will pick this up in the morning…

each topic gets set a different priority based on the number of posts and activity in the topic…  basic priority of a forum page is 0.4… but can be .6 or .8 based on the activity in it…

obviously lots of ways to do this…  newness of topic for example could enter into the equation..  we could probably add a filter on the priority so users can do their own priority calc…  not even sure that priority is a big deal to the search engines though…