Is Google complaining about nodebb or something else?
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@NodeHam Yes, nothing of any concern there. I also use the Q&A plugin, and I know that creates better SEO as mine increased after I installed it - I have a use case for this because my site is a consultancy where members can ask questions and get assistance around technology.
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Robots in admin/settings/web-crawler is set as follows. At least this is the most current testing since finding this problem.
User-Agent: *
Sitemap: https://xxx.com/sitemap/topics.xml
Sitemap: https://xxx.com/sitemap/topics.1.xml
Sitemap: https://xxx.com/sitemap/categories.xml
Sitemap: https://xxx.com/sitemap/pages.xml -
@phenomlab, thanks very much. I'll install that plugin for sure if it helps even a little bit
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One problem at a time I guess :). I'll try it again at some point.
Need to focus on how to get these forums indexed.
There's a ton of searchable, relevant content that Google is not seeing and that's a bad thing since I only see two pages found for the last year of indexing. -
@NodeHam looking at this list...
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=133 user/seo-crawler/followers viewtopic.php?p=193 user/sergrid/posts viewtopic.php?p=70 user/ibm-research-bot/groups viewtopic.php?p=80 viewtopic.php?p=208 user/toliklus/topics?sort=lastpost groups/registered_coppaA lot of it seems to be pages that have query strings that do nothing in NodeBB. e.g.
?p=,?sort=lastpost, evenviewtopic.phpis not a route we maintain, etc.They signify that Google is hitting the 404s because it remembers indexing them from before, likely due to older software you were using on the same site, does that sound right?
As for indexing, you'll also need to make sure that the "spiders" group has access to all of your categories, otherwise Google won't be able to index them
Juuuuust for fun here's ours:
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@NodeHam Let's focus on the two main culprits:
Alternate page with proper canonical tag
This suggests that pages were found that have a
<link rel="canonical" ..>pointing to another page. In an of itself not an issue, although I think you can expand that and see a sample of URLs that fall under this category. They should all make sense (e.g./topic/123/5should have a canonical url/topic/123, since it's just pointing to the 5th post in topic 123).Page with redirect
Digging into ours, I am seeing that most of the entries here fall under two categories:
/post/12312/topic/{tid}/{slug}?lang=en-GB
The former is expected, it's a permalink that sends you directly to that pid. The latter is also valid (in that it loads the same content with or without the query string), but is concerning insomuch that I don't know where Google finds the
?lang=en-GBparameter from.I will mark it for review, but that said, it shouldn't matter that it redirects, the original page should still be indexed properly.
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likely due to older software you were using on the same site, >does that sound right?
Yes, you're right on that, those would be the old phpbb forums links so it answers that. Still doesn't answer why the rest of our forums aren't being indexed however so reading on.
As for indexing, you'll also need to make sure that the "spiders" >group has access to all of your categories, otherwise Google >won't be able to index them
Ok, you might have hit on something again. Looking under Manage, Groups, this is what I'm seeing.
As you can see, some of those options cannot be changed however.
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Very interesting. Indeed. Indubitably, even.
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FWIW it still does seem new topics get indexed, and fairly quickly, at that. This topic already shows up on both Google and DDG
So it's really a matter of understanding that, yeah, Google marks a whole whackload of pages as duplicates, but that's ok, because they really are duplicates (e.g. redirects to actual topics, topic indices, etc.)
As long as the actual content does get indexed, we're ok, and so far that still seems to be the case.
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I do recall now that I posted about setting this up when first starting to use these forums.
Maybe I need to share the site so that it's easier to see what I'm seeing or at least thinking I'm seeing :).
When searching using site: sitename.com, next to nothing shows up.
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I can search an exact specific topic AND include the name of the site and nothing shows up. You would think it would be the very first result considering how specific it is.
I'm having this discussion on another site and really could use help to confirm what the problem is.
Is it a problem with NodeBB? Are my forums set correctly or is Google simply not indexing us for some reason? -
We have the same issue on a non NodeBB site, that was ported from phpBB like you, exactly the same vie topic link issues, but with very similar stats to what @julain posted, 80K redirect not indexed / not started and about 30K canonical not indexed / not started - over all I think approx 130K+ unindexed or not started.
I also concur with @julain - new content does appear to get indexed very quickly and if it's SEO friendly + is hot topic at that time, traffic magic happens.
@NodeHam said in Google constantly complains about nodebb forums:
We used to spend a great deal of time on SEO but found it was a never ending game with Google and could not justify spending so much time at it.
I concur also with @gotwf and @phenomlab that SEO has overtones of snake oil or it always feels like you're shooting in the dark very much like you have outlined here. I think you know the answer.
Worry about it less, do nothing to please google, keep an eye on it, and see if patterns form.
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The pattern has been there, it's why I started asking about it :).
I have to worry about it because SEO and trying to mainly grow organically is all we have.
We're seeing less traffic than we should be, especially with forums posts which are highly relevant to what we're offering.So yes, I'm aware of the left over links from phpbb but that's not the main problem. Most of those were converted to land into the new nodebb forums but there are some stragglers.
Can someone share what their sitemap links look like.
I'd like to make sure I'm not missing something.User-Agent: *
Sitemap: xxx/sitemap/topics.1.xml
Sitemap: xxx/sitemap/categories.xml
Sitemap: xxx/sitemap/pages.xml
