Really Important Message For Admin

garebih265

There is some serious problem with vanilla forums structure I have read in one of the blog of Google that if your website structure is bad then google bot get confused and doesn't index the page.

So if you look at the vanilla forums structure.

The URL structure is like this:

example.com/discussion/1/hello-world/

example.com/discussion/10/call-now/

example.com/discussion/50/whats-up/

example.com/discussion/100/ranking/

If you see above then you will notice that for each new discussion vanilla forums create new directory like /1/, /10/, /50/, /100/ 

this is really bad seo practice it's same as creating 1 subdomain for 1 post.

Eg - subdomain1.example.com/hello/

    subdomain2.example.com/good/

    subdomain3.example.com/nice/

This is the main reason behind the indexing issue of vanilla forums. 

Admin - Please fix this and make the URL structure as simple as possible. Put all the new discussion under the 1 directory 

Like 

example.com/discussion/hello-world/

example.com/discussion/call-now/

example.com/discussion/whats-up/

example.com/discussion/ranking/

With current vanilla URL structure google will take 1-3 months to index a single discussion because google treat each new directory/subdomain Differently

ianw5555

Is this a solution?

https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/31488/how-to-make-short-discussion-urls-for-vanilla

manticore789

Looks promising. Am giving it a shot.

Bleistivt

@garebih265 Could you please share a link to that blog post?

What you are describing is not a problem and probably stems from a misunderstanding of googles indexing. Vanilla forum URLs get indexed perfectly fine all the time and if yours aren't it is most likely due to your server or installation being misconfigured.

garebih265

I have proofs..... And again I'm not saying that google will not index. Google will definitely index but after 15 -30 days or even after 2 months.

You have to accept that to index new directory google takes time upto 2 months and this is the fact

In case of vanilla forums it's create 1 directory for 1 discussion.

garebih265

Then why only 5 pages are indexed in google since 1 week and 0 pages in last 48 hours (open.vanillaforums.com) This Forums Report

R_J

It's strange that open.vanillaforums.com is indexed so bad. Looking at other Vanilla forums you will find very different results. I just started a similar search (changes in the last 24 hours) for https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/ and it gave me 7 pages of results.

Technically there is no difference between the software used here and used on that page. So what can we learn from that? One forum indexed bad and one forum indexed excellent, both using the same software?

Hardware => performance differences? Theoretically. But open.vanillaforums.com and forums.oculusvr.com are forums provided by Vanilla as SaaS so even the hardware should be more or less identical. (Both server can even be in the same room!)

If it is neither the software nor the hardware that's different, what else can it be?

I know there are myriad of gurus out there who try to make money by telling people how to optimize their pages so that their pages rank higher in search engines (and certainly there always is something which can be tweaked). But I've heard rumors that in the end only content matters...

garebih265

https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/261037#Comment_261037

I know that the content matters and my website has high quality content. but here the problem is not content but crawling issue.

google easily crawl those pages which is closer to the root domain or some directory which google is aware of but in case of vanilla it is creating new directory for each new discussion like /1/, /100/, /1000/ etc. Making it harder for google to crawl the website thats the main issue.

if you don't believe what i'm saying you can try it yourself take two domain name and write 5 -10 articles in both but with different URL structure.

Domain 1 Article URL Structure - example.com/hello/, example.com/how/, example.com/nice/, example.com/well/, example.com/cool/

Domain 2 Article URL Structure - example.com/1/hello/, example.com/2/how/, example.com/3/nice/, example.com/4/well/ etc.

now generate sitemap for both and submit it to google and fetch all the URL manually. after doing that you will notice that google will instantly index the domain 1 articles.

while google will take 5 - 30 days to index domain 2 articles and sometime its even take 2 months.

we human may see /1/, /2/, /3/, /4/, /5/ as a article id but for crawlers its simply a new directory and as per my experience i can say that search engines always hesitate to crawler a new directory.