Is Google complaining about nodebb or something else?

julian

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.

NodeHam

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.

NodeHam

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NodeHam

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NodeHam

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?

omega

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.

NodeHam

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

NodeHam

Just one thing. At the very least, I'd like to make sure I have the correct settings in what I've shown :).

omega

@NodeHam

I’m curious.

Where you motivated to look more closely at Google search console to pinpoint the source of recent lack lustre traffic coming to the site?

NodeHam

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?

omega

@NodeHam Approx how much time?

gotwf

@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.

NodeHam

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?

omega

@gotwf Probably as per GA traffic break-outs as the top two are usually organic and direct.

julian

@NodeHam in the Google search console, you should be able to query specific URLs to see whether they are indexed, and if not, then the reason why not.

Could you perhaps try that with a couple of topic links, and see what shows up?

NodeHam

Yes, I've looked at what is getting indexed but it's confusing to me why some posts get indexed and others don't.
I'll keep trying to get Google to look again now that I've removed the one xml from the sitemap list.

julian

@NodeHam The only site map you should submit is /sitemap.xml (e.g. community.nodebb.org/sitemap.xml). Google will take the links from the pages that link out from this sitemap.

NodeHam

That's what I originally started with then while testing, put the three that are found in that link into Google.
I've cut it back to the single URL now so maybe that will help.

Thanks for letting me know. I'll keep an eye on it and update.

julian

@baris did a deep dive on this one over the last two days and figured out why we were seeing ?lang=en-GB in the search console.

I don't know right now what effect that will have on SEO, but given that the query string parameter was superfluous, I don't expect to see any harm in it.

NodeHam

What I see is Google finding a ton of things that it complains about.
Like you pointed out, some of those were in fact left over from our previous forum software/links but I'll keep an eye open as this progresses to see which might be directly related to NodeBB in case it can help.