Is Google complaining about nodebb or something else?
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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? -
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@baris did a deep dive on this one over the last two days and figured out why we were seeing
?lang=en-GBin 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.
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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. -
Here is one such URL in the non indexed list that Google provides.
When I go to this link, I see the thread that was posted so I know it exists but Google says it cannot index it.https://doh.com/topic/217/some-topic/27?lang=en-GB&page=4
LOL!!!! Don't use xxx to replace your domain
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Hanging around in pile of tabs a thing of direct interest and insight!
Google Says ‘Discovered - Currently Not Indexed’ Status Can Last Forever
‘Discovered - Currently not indexed’ in the Google Search Console Index Coverage report can potentially last forever, as the search engine doesn’t index every page.
Search Engine Journal (www.searchenginejournal.com)
What are you gonna do with that?
