Helping Google Spider Your Site

The easier you make it for Google, the more Google will reward you....

Here is one little trick I use.

In the footer of the forum, make a series of text links, each linking to your archive, specifically each linking to the url of individual forums. (you can see this in the footer of this page)

Then reverse the process, placing links in your archive pointing to the main forums.

If you have alot of forums, and dont want to make that many links, then only creat links to the forums that are the most relevent to your site theme. (meaning not your chit chat or welcome forums for example)

This gives your forums and your archive sitewide links to each other. When google crawls any page, its linked to many other places on your site and basically the spider can ricochet around your site.

You also should think about linking to other areas of your site that are important and keyword rich, such as article pages if you have them. If you add a new article, add the link, then replace it a week or two later with a new article link. This gets google spidering there also.

Why this helps is simple. For a spider to make its way to a specific thread, it has to get to your forum home, then to the specific forum, then spider a thread, then it has to go back to the forumhome and start the route again in order to spider another thread. That is the only route a spider can make.

If you make the little addition I describe here, the spider can go directly to the individual forums and sub forums from any page on your site. And to further enhance it, its also bouncing back and forth between your main site and the archive.

Hope this helps.

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Good Stuff...

What is the value of a txt link over a image link in the forum and archive footer. For myself I have the showthread turned off to guests so they arnet allowed to view threads the same applys to search bots.

I have some template changes on vbadvanced and the board next to the forum and thread icons that link to the thread and forum archive.

You can check it out at my board, its just a simple template mod this seems to make spiders stay about for a bit more longer, rather than seeing the no permmision page agian and agian and then bolting off probly giveing up on the site cause of the lack of content.

Remember something. When a spider comes to your site, its treated as a guest by the software. You WANT the spiders to crawl any pages relevent to your site.

And all I get is a no permission page when I look at a post. What do you expect google to spider and index?

The idea is for the bots to go to the archive rather than the forum threads and have guests register.

in adv_portal_latesttopicbits this replaces the post icon html code. The same can be done for forum home templates and thredbit.

<a href="$vboptions[bburl]/archive/index.php/t-$thread[threadid].html"><img src="$thread[threadiconpath]" alt="$thread[threadicontitle] $thread[title] $vbphrase[archive]" border="0" /></a>

Seen a new bot today..

64.124.85.209
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BecomeBot/1.73; MSIE 6.0 compatible; +http://www.become.com/webmasters.html

so a spider goes to the archive, and reg viewers go to the registration page?

For a spider to make its way to a specific thread, it has to get to your forum home, then to the specific forum, then spider a thread, then it has to go back to the forumhome and start the route again in order to spider another thread. That is the only route a spider can make.

To resolve this matter the "« Previous Thread | Next Thread »" buttons are there, no?

so a spider goes to the archive, and reg viewers go to the registration page?


Wouldn't this be "cloaking" .

thats what I was thinking.