Google must dislike my website..

[unix88]

Hi, i opened a new forum just over one month ago, its not very active but ive been trying to get the search engines liking the website. MSN seems to be indexing my pages fine and my MSN rank isn't too bad, but Google has only indexed the index of the forum, and its know where to be seen when searching google (here (http://www.google.com/search?q=unix+discussion&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&meta=)). I'm not much of a SEO but i havent done too bad so far, ive got quite a few links back to my website including google PR websites, so im just confused why Google isnt picking my site up?

Has anyone got any ideas?

Regards,
Terry

[Marcia]

Hey Terry, with a one month old forum site, SEO won't help a whole lot except to tell you whether the site is search engine friendly, and if Yahoo and MSN don't have a problem with it, then it can't be too awfully bad.

What you want to find out (aside from other seo-friendly features) is whether you can customize the page titles so they won't be the same, etc. Look around at forums in general to see why some would be ranking well and see how yours compares technically.

Google hates ALL new sites nowadays, it just takes time. And with a forum site, your users will be creating the most of the content, which will by its very nature be targeted and using the right terminology. You might try putting up a few static content pages (if you don't have them already) that would attract inbound links

First, look at the number of pages returned for the search you linked to - over 10M, and it really isn't as targeted as it could be. This search term (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=unix+discussion+forum) is a little more realistic, as would be Unix forum - the two word search. And remember that not everyone will search for that - some will search on very specific topics and have specific questions they'll be searching on. As content grows, so will your search engine reach.

As the forum grows, so will the content and if it's all search engine friendly, then the traffic should come. Concentrate on building up your traffic and the qualilty of discussions, and try to get inbound links - both for search engine purposes and for growth.

If you haven't already, if there's been a decent amount of activity so it doesn't still look like a start-up, submit to the proper category in the ODP, following guidelines carefully. And find other directories and places to get the site listed - look for quality and potential for attracting visitors.

[GOTseo]

Is this is in the right Forum? I can consult with you for ....2,000,000 :D

To see standing results in google your looking at more than 30 days.

[unix88]

heh GOTseo, ok thanks for the great reply Marcia, well i've got a fair few links from other websites linking to the forum, with good ranks. also their are titles on each thread as you can see here (http://www.unixdiscussion.com/showthread.php?t=66). Yeah i've got to liven up my moderators lol, i've submitted to over 100 search engines even though i doubt it'd make much difference :confused:. Is there anything else i could do? or just sit, post and wait?

thanks

[GOTseo]

MOd Rewrite would be a good start, (there might be updates to make your board write with search engine frienly URL's)

Also I have noticed with many forums, since they are dynamicly generated, there is troulbe finding the content in the posts. You also have no description tags for the forum. (If you want to get really tricky, you can have custom tags for each post of the forums)

I would suggest having a static page as your index and then link into the forums from the home page.

[unix88]

oh ok thanks, well the search engine uses search engine friendly url's i believe, and vb are known for good seo techniques i believe :rolleyes:

thanks for the help anyways, feel free to sign up on unix discussion (http://www.unixdiscussion.com/register.php) ;)

terry

[I, Brian]

It's vBulletin - you'll do fine. :)

There are a few basic SEO techniques you can practice on a vB3, but the standard "out of the box" is search engine friendly by default. So you should have no trouble with indexing.

As warned, though, don't expect Google to rank you for significant keywords anytime soon, though. And forums take a lot of effort to move from start, so you are chewing on a very challenging task starting so many at once - but best of luck with it. :)

[unix88]

hehe ok thanks brian :)

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

There are so many forums around these days that you need extensive optimization of ANY forum software solution to make it rank for just about anything. However, as most forums are controled from a few key templates it is usually not a problem to improve your optimization over time - as long as you make sure the basics are fine.

[unix88]

yeah, well even today my rank on MSN search for 'unix discussion' has gone up from 3rd to 2nd, so i musnt be doing to badly at the moment