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How come vanilla forums seem to perform poorly with Google's web search?

blizeHblizeH ✭✭
edited August 2006 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
^ :(

Comments

  • I havent expirenced that at all. Theres been a few people that found my forum through google.
  • How long has your forum been live? Are you using Friendly URLs? Is your niche competitive? Are any sites in that niche linking to yours? vice versa... I am not a SEO expert and have not launched a forum yet, but I am guessing that vanilla is structured very well. My guess is that you need to focus on content and popularity. Best of luck....
  • It's not. Really. What are you searching for?
  • Hunch tells me that vanilla will outperform other forums for the same reason many google results seem to prefer the lo-fi versions of a thread from that other forum software company.
  • ... or maybe many forum owners just feed googlebot those versions to save bandwidth.
  • edited July 2006
    Yeah, Google loves my Vanilla forum. My discussion community use to use a heavily mod'd phpBB. I worked very hard to make it SEO, and eventually got a PR4. Google ate up the site, but it rarely updated its index of topics.. And it wasn't very keyword effective. Since my switch to Vanilla, Google practically rapes my site. Having all of the discussions in the root has helped. Like WallPhone said, I think Google likes it because keywords are more dense since you don't have so much statistics and other crap on your pages. However, one thing about Vanilla is that you don't have as much interlinking... So Google doesn't seem to value your discussions as much (because PR gets evenly spread across your Vanilla.). Might be able to solve that with extensions like featured posts, popular posts, random, related, etc.
  • we need a sitemap.xml generator for vanilla like this for wordpress: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final And TAGS - Google Love Tags
  • Try Google Sitmaps. I guess you dont need sitemap generator for small mid-traffic sites.
  • why not?! No site is too small for traffic
  • edited July 2006
    If you have access to your log, sitemap generator can generate the map from the access log.
  • meta tag Keywords help.
  • building a landing page also helps
  • what I meant is ... how often does your site have major upgrades good if sitemap *generator* exist but you could probably manage without it
  • I use this to create sitemaps for my sites. Depending on the updating of the site I run it either once a week or once a month and resubmit the sitemap.xml in google sitemaps. Works a treat.

    A google sitemaps extension would rock hard though.
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