Is your forum search engine friendly?

[AssociatePrograms.com]

Hi Dan, Fantastic site. Congratulations! You've obviously done a LOT of work.

In the News section, I love the story about the house for sale for only $1.
That made my imagination rev for a while. I feel like flying half way round the globe to have a look!

Here's a little tip about your forum which may be useful ...

It looks as though your forum uses dynamic links, which could be a problem if you want Google to find the posts people make. Google CAN follow dynamic links, but it doesn't like them and so usually it avoids following them.

This means that as this forum becomes popular and your visitors create hundreds or perhaps thousands of posts, Google probably won't index most of those posts.

I solved the problem in August by hiring a programmer to do a mod_rewrite.
The whole thing was discussed on my forum first, so I received lots of wonderful free advice.

The result has been utterly fantastic. The forum is now search engine friendly. Google is indexing thousands of pages that previously weren't being indexed. The number keeps climbing every day.

I just checked by doing this search in Google...

site:AssociatePrograms.com

...and I see that 39,500 pages are now indexed.

As a result, my site is now being found via thousands of new phrases. Our traffic has already soared by about 500 a day, just from Google.

You're building a valuable resource here. It would be a shame if Google doesn't index all the pages.

Hope that helps.

[Dan Auito]

Allan this is such a huge insight, I thank you for catching it so early in the life of this forum. I have sent word to my webmaster Vic to contact you to figure out just what needs to be done. It sure is nice having one of the masters drop by with such a valuable suggestion, that's what's so nice about all these great people coming to the boards!

And as for those one dollar houses, I think the neighborhoods you find them in would have you running back to sydney in a New York minute, but you can always come stay with us and we'll find plenty of good deals for you!

Thanks again Allan, that was huge! :praise:

[AssociatePrograms.com]

Hi Dan

Glad you found the info useful. Here's the link the discussion that eventually led to us to do the forum mod_rewrite...

This forum software
http://associateprograms.com/discus/ftopic3932.html

It's a bit waffly in parts - a typical forum discussion - but it contains some excellent material and useful links for more info. When I hired a programmer to do the mod_rewrite, I directed him to that discussion.

All the best.

[Dan Auito]

Gee Allan maybe your programmer should get with my programmer and they can swap stories and insights on this topic. I think your man could probably save vic a lot of aggravation. What do you think? :huh:

[AssociatePrograms.com]

He's not "my programmer". I don't have such a wonderful luxury! He's someone I hired for the task.

He lives in New Zealand, and works for NZ prices. He's very busy. Right now, I'm waiting for him to do another job for me.

I can give you his email address. However, your forum uses vBulletin. Mine uses phpbb, which the programmer I hired is familiar with.

Perhaps it would be a better idea to track down someone who is familiar with vBulletin forums. That would simplify things for you.

[Dan Auito]

Allan you might inquire upon Vic, my webmaster/programmer. The man has more experience(in programming) then moses has in the animal biz. I'll let vic analize the situation and return a verdict. I have faith and confidence in his abilities. thanks again Allan! Dan

[zymsys]

Great idea Alan,

Google does however spider vBulletin sites "out of the box". It used to require a hack to do with cookies, but in this version of vBulletin that hack is not required. I've actually found this feature frusterating if I'm looking on google for something to do with vBulletin, most of the hits are from vBulletin forums, but not directly related to vBulletin!

The fact that the threads' URLs have ? in them doesn't deter Google. For example, I just did a seach on "vbulletin real estate" and the sixth hit was:

http://forums.kiplinger.com/showthread.php?t=2342&goto=nextoldest

Thanks for the idea though! This may have been a problem at one point, but I'm pretty sure we're in the clear now.