Help with my GT-NextGEN_Beta_0.4

Newbie Joined: Dec 22, 2007 Posts: 13

Hey guys I don'y know what has gone wrong but all the sudden now for a full week Google has stopped indexing my forum pages...

Do you guys have an idea of what might have caused this??

Sorry for opening this thread in this area but I could not find a place for it..

Thanks in advanced.

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 375

GT NextGen is antiquated, cannot believe anyone is till using it.
There are a lot of reasons why your forum might not be getting indexed and most of those do not even relate to whether you are using url re-writing or not.
You may have content which is 'not approved'.
My might be using a domain which was previously blacklisted.
You may have other modifications which are adding no-index or no-follow rules.
You may have an invalid or inappropriate rules in htaccess which is blocking crawlers.
You may have invalid or inappropriate rules in your robots.txt file.
Your forums might have 'registered user' access permissions in which case they cannot be seen by search engines.
... the list goes on.

Newbie Joined: Dec 22, 2007 Posts: 13

thanks for your reply the sad part is that everything was working fine until about 6 days ago...

now what you see on google is the front page of my site and not the actual link to the forum post...

example:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Victor+Dinaire+-+Lost+Episode+DI.FM+2008.11.07+&btnG=Search

you will see my site listed as the 3rd option but its only giving you my URL, not the URL of the post in the forum...

Only thing I did different which seems to have caused this is try to use the "bridge" to nuke and phpbb3 so I installed a new board, using the same data from my nuke board, installed on directory /forums, so I added a line in my robot file to "Disallow:"
last night I changed the directory completely but still no indexing...

Guardian,

what is a better alternative to GT-NextGEn ?

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 375

So your site is urtrancezone
Google has indexed that text as being on your front page because it appeared there in the forum block.
As I said in my previous post, there are a lot of reasons why the forums themselves might not be getting indexed especially when you are telling search engines to use our sitemap but it is empty.

Newbie Joined: Dec 22, 2007 Posts: 13

Guardian,

yes that is my site...

so ShortLinks is still kept up to date?

I have remmoved the "sitemap" command from the robot file... its been there for months with no problem..

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1281

Unfortunately, I don't think this is really a GT or ShortLinks issue as it sounds like you swapped out the core phpBB2 with phpBB3 (or have I misunderstood)? Aren't those links different? (Don't know, as I haven't looked.) But, if the linking system is different, of course Google is going to drop out the content that it can no longer find and it will take time for it to crawl your new phpBB pages.

Make sure an anonymous user can "crawl" your new phpBB3 forums and it might be good to submit some kind of sitemap to Google with the new forum links.

Newbie Joined: Dec 22, 2007 Posts: 13

This is what I did ...

I used this "bridge" and installed a new forum phpbb3

http://www.osc2nuke.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=41

in the robot file I asked it not to index phpbb3 because I am just doing testing and did not want google to index this, because it will be removed..

The last time my forum was successfuly index was the day before my new phpbb3 board came online... I now have moved the forum to a new directory "/testing11" and have asked the robot not to index that page..

I might aswell just delete the phpbb3 "bridged" forum and see if things go back to normal... Embarassed

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1281

Ah, I see. What was the exact directive in robots.txt. If it was just:

Forums

Not sure though. I wonder if

/Forums/

was what was needed. However, good idea to change the name entirely just to be sure.

Newbie Joined: Dec 22, 2007 Posts: 13

montego wrote:

Ah, I see. What was the exact directive in robots.txt. If it was just:

Forums

Not sure though. I wonder if

/Forums/

was what was needed. However, good idea to change the name entirely just to be sure.

yeah I made the mistake when I first installed the phpBB3 to leave it on directory "/forum" and asked the robot file not to index "/forum" which is very similar to my GT-NextGen PhpBB directory of "forums" Embarassed

IDIOT move!

Now I wait to see if google index my pages...

Will let you know... I have a headache now! Shocked

Newbie Joined: Dec 22, 2007 Posts: 13

montego & Guardian

How would someone go about on creating a sitemap for a forum?? Will a new file need to be created daily manually??

will this work...

<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.site.com/forums.html</loc>
<lastmod>2008-11-09</lastmod>
<changefreq>hourly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.site.com/modules.php?name=Forums</loc>
<lastmod>2008-11-09</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.7</priority>
</url>

</urlset>

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1281

Well, I use nukeSEO's (nukeSEO.com) sitemap. It will produce both a site crawlable one as well as a Google specific one. If you use the core *nuke forums that is...

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 375

First of all, please accept my apologies for my earlier post. I came across a bit grumpy and that was not my intention.
I thought I had mentioned something about robots.txt in relation to blocking 'forum' but I probably ended up posting that on a different site lol, it has been one of those days.
As to your question about the sitemap, it really depends.....
If you are using a standrd *nuke setup you could use the Sitemap module from www.nukeseo.com but if you wanted to use that for a phpBB3 forum, you would definitely have to modify it.

You do not need to create a new sitemap every day unless you are getting some big changes in your content every day. Weekly is usually more than enough and some of my sites only update once a month..

Newbie Joined: Dec 22, 2007 Posts: 13

at this point I am just trying to get my current forum on my nuke portal indexed

the bridge to phpbb3 was just for testing and not schedule to go live for a while...

I guess since I added "Disallow: /forum/" in my robot file, it might have also included my nuke forums.

Newbie Joined: Dec 22, 2007 Posts: 13

montego wrote:

Well, I use nukeSEO's (nukeSEO.com) sitemap. It will produce both a site crawlable one as well as a Google specific one. If you use the core *nuke forums that is...

Thank you!!!!!

Newbie Joined: Dec 22, 2007 Posts: 13

Guardian wrote:

First of all, please accept my apologies for my earlier post. .

No need to apologies, Thank you!