g1smd - 10:53 am on May 10, 2006 (gmt 0)

If you understand the few simple technical issues surrounding all of this then the fixes are very simple. They are basic SEO and design.

Make sure that every page of the site has a unique title and meta description.

Make sure that every page of the site links back to "/" and to the main section indexes.

Make sure that all domain.com accesses are redirected to the same page in the www.domain.com version of the site.

If you have mutiple domains, then use the 301 redirect on those such that only one domain is indexed.

If you have pages that say to bots "Error. You Are Not Logged In", for example "newthread", "newreply", "editProfile" and "sendPM" links in a forum, then make sure the link has rel="nofollow" on it, and the target page has <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> on it too.

If you have a CMS, forum, or cart that has pages that could have multiple URLs, then get the script modified to put a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag on all but one "version" of the page.

Use the site: search to see what you have indexed, and work to correct these issues. The presense of Supplemental Results, URL-only entries, or hitting the "repeat this search with omitted results included" message very quickly are all indications that you have stuff that needs fixing.

It is a sad fact that systems like vBulletin, PHPbb, osCommerce, and a whole range of popular scripted sites, have a large number of SEO-related design errors built in to them. The designers are clever programmers, but have no clue about SEO or how their site will interact with search engines; and the situation isn't getting any better.