Google - Some questions

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big_mike
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Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 8:31 am Post subject: Google - Some questions

My forum has finally showed up on google in the last couple of days. If I do a search for my URL it comes back with this text as a description: "Hunt Point %26amp%3B Retriever dogs %28UK%29 or Versatile hunting dogs %28US%29 which work in any way%2C including%3A Gundog Working Tests%2C Spring ..." Why are the %26 etc. codes displayed in the description? It looks pants! Are these words in the description some of the keywords people might use to find our forum? Also I have an account with google sitemaps which allows me to look at the info google has indexed about my forum. It is saying that " Some of your pages are partially indexed. " why is this? It seems to imply the problem is at my end not theirs. I have looked into sitemaps a bit but other posts on here by admin indicate that they aren't useful for forums. I was wondering why this was the case (it appears that a lot of forums do submit sitemaps). What about if maybe I submitted a truncated sitemap that only lists the good stickies on the forum? _________________ http://workinghprs.myfastforum.org/index.php

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Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 8:39 am Post subject:

Can you quote me on where i have said site maps are not useful? I know they have been considered for the forums but were found problematic, and that yes good stickies are far more important. Not quite sure why google is showing raw html codes in the description, but it won't effect you being found. You could alter your description to remove the & I suppose. But the way the description is handled our side is totally normal phpbb2. _________________ Family Friendly Shareware \| \| Web Design/Services \| Free Forums forum.myfreeforum.org

big_mike
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Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 8:48 am Post subject:

Quote:

Don't worry about sitemaps they are not relevent to forums.

That was you, I think. Anyhow link is below:

http://forum.myfreeforum.org/ftopic1907.php&highlight=sitemap
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Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 9:21 am Post subject:

big_mike wrote:

Quote:

Don't worry about sitemaps they are not relevent to forums.

That was you, I think. Anyhow link is below:

http://forum.myfreeforum.org/ftopic1907.php&highlight=sitemap

Okay that was a bit of a blanket response.

Saved a lot of typing though

In more detail let us say that sitemaps are meant to bend googles view of what is important on your site, allowing you to point to pages that are several clicks in buit which are in fact the ones you want google to look at. Otherwise google will start looking from the index page and/or pages linked to from other sites.
In the case of a forum you should be putting the important stuff in the stickies, which are just two clicks in, and at the top of the first clicked page.
This means that the situation is pretty good, however if a sitemap did just point to the stickies then yes it might be better still.
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big_mike
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Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 9:48 am Post subject:

Thanks for the explanation, there is such a steep learning with all of this stuff! I am a bit concerned that some of the pages are partially indexed, what would cause this to happen? Can I improve things? Am I right in thinking that it is possible to inculde a small sitemap with the templates as they stand? (I use the subsilver with a tiny mod for stats) or is it something you need to do? _________________ http://workinghprs.myfastforum.org/index.php

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Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 10:17 am Post subject:

Google does not automatically index everything, sitemaps or not, it will depend on how google rates your forum. This means that following the other google tips about getting links in particular counts for a lot more than site maps. I am a little rusty on google sitemaps, as I understand it, there are generic sitemaps used by all search engines, e.g. a page linked on your site than contains links to all relevent other places on your site. Then there is the new google sitemap, that is a special XML file that google needs telling about via your google site account. Both of these things are not really easily done by you. Last time I looked they did not look easy for us either But as I have said I don't rate this as an important issue. We do however have a few things up our sleaves for the near future _________________ Family Friendly Shareware \| \| Web Design/Services \| Free Forums forum.myfreeforum.org

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Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 10:54 am Post subject:

I await a look up your sleeves in the near future! _________________ http://workinghprs.myfastforum.org/index.php