UBB and Google

Google indexes category and main forum pages but not individual threads

[geckofuel]

Though I have a PR7 site, Google consistently misses the indexing of the larger part of my site content which is stored in a UBB classic bulletin board. Google only indexes the Main forum pages but not individual threads.

Does anyone have any suggestions for ensuring that Google indexes each thread in UBB?

[Brett_Tabke]

get rid of the session id's.

[geckofuel]

My board has never used session IDs (not as far as I can tell - though I could just be wrong about what a session ID is). I'm sending a an example of a link to a thread on my UBB board. Could someone point out to me exactly what is wrong?

Thread Link:
[mydomain.org...]

Forum Link:
[mydomain.org...]

The only difference I can see is an extra dynamic element in the Thread Link as opposed to the Forum link which is in fact indexed by Google.

[Giacomo]

geckfuel,

The "depth" of the crawl and the actual number of dynamic pages that will be included in Google's index are both related to your PageRank.

[werty]

I use an UBB forum on my site. I have a PR5 that was reduced to 4 this last dance. And I have over 600 ubb pages in google. Many are user profiles but there are also many threads.

Do a search for this: allinurl:www.domain.com

I was suprised to find that it was crawling my UBB.

here is my setup:
Main forum list
www.domain.com/cgi-bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro&BypassCookie=true

threads in forum:
www.domain.com/cgi-bin/ubb/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&forum=General&number=1&DaysPrune=30&LastLogin=

actual thread:
www.domain.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/006893.html

[geckofuel]

Werty,
What do you use to produce the static pages that you list? Could you go into more detail about how you achieved indexing?

In particular, could you tell me how you go from this:

www.domain.com/cgi-bin/ubb/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&forum=General&number=1&DaysPrune=30&LastLogin=

to this:

www.domain.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/006893.html

[werty]

I think it just may be the version that is being used. I have an old one 5.47.

And all I have is one link from my index to "messageboard" which points to the main forum list.

[Yidaki]

>In particular, could you tell me how you go from this: >www.domain.com/cgi-bin/ubb/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&...
>to this: www.domain.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/006893.html

It actually depends on your BB software. Since i saw another thread of one fellow member who's got trouble to bring his VBulletin forums into google, i'd suggest that you visit your software support forums.

I use phpbb and found some infos and modifications at their support forum. You could read here at WebmasterWorld and search for htaccess and mod_rewrite rules ... but this could be a big hassle. All the different board softwares have their own rules and difficulties. Their support forums are normally the best place for this kind of questions.

[Giacomo]

Each board has it own hacks... With phpBB you don't even have to use mod_rewrite, but you do have to hand-edit a few lines of code and modify your Apache PHP configuration.

For a bulletin board with built-in spider-friendly features, I'm afraid we'll have to wait for BestBBS [bestbbs.com] to be released, though. ;)

Any timeline, Brett?