Is Google complaining about nodebb or something else?
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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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Googlebot picking up `?lang=en-GB` from somewhere Ā· Issue #10993 Ā· NodeBB/NodeBB
I am not certain whether this is a bug, but it is causing noisy entries in webmaster tools. We've received two separate reports (one privately, one here) that the query string ?lang=en-GB is added to URLs reported in the webmaster tools....
GitHub (github.com)
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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 -
Not recent, it's been over time.
I removed all of the sitemap links from the Google search console and entered new ones which I think will help.
As I understand it, if you don't submit links, search engines just search but don't know everything on a site.
By submitting a sitemap, you are then confined to that sitemap so it has to be correct.Do mine look correct or are there some others I need to look at or can generate for the forums?
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@NodeHam said in Google constantly complains about nodebb forums:
organically is all we have
Mayhaps we should elaborate on our definitiion(s) for 'organically'?
I have found this term can be used as a catch-all and mean different things to different world views.
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It's over a year, maybe a year and a half to two.
I found that the sitemaps were not useful to Google so as I said, I've changed them to what I show above.
That could explain why since I'm not sure when those would have been submitted but likely around the time that nodebb was started for us.
Can someone confirm my question about sitemaps? -
