Forum Moderators: open
The templates have some basic search engine friendly optimisations .. title tags, h1, no sessionhashes in critical locations, css'ed as much as physically possible.
One of the sites which used to have 20K+ discussion topics has now virtually disappeared. Our calendar listings are there, our resource listings are there.. but our forum discussions have *gone*.
I moved the site to a sub-domain - from site.com/forum/ to forum.site.com and changed all the links over to reflect the change. The inbound links are from PR 5-PR 6 pages.
Google has been indexing the site. It has picked up the index pages, the forum pages and calendar pages.. however, it refuses to spider the showthread.php page. The spidering activity indicates that Google is treating showthread.php as an excluded page.
Yes, I was running an archive hack from one of the vB forums and I had removed this a few months earlier (which is when the pages started dropping) as I SEO'ed the existing templates.
Yes, I've validated the robots.txt and no, it does not include the showthread.php page.
My questions:
a) Have any other vb owners had this problem?
b) What would you do? Don't want to move to a new domain as this is a very well branded site and feeds into our mom/pop online store.
c) Should I just wait and give google a few more weeks to spider?
d) I'm desperate enough to rename and recode the site to change showthread.php to another file display.php or something like that? Should I do this?
Googleguy mentioned that variables with more than 4 or 5 digits may be suspect. Our threads have 5-6 digits as their identifiers which might have prevented Googlebot from doing a deep index.
Problem was solved using two tactics
1) using mod_rewrite to change the file name from /forum/showthread.php?threadid=123456 to /topic_123456
2) Moving the forums to a subdomain i.e. forum.site.com instead of site.com/forum
2 weeks into this fix we've 600 odd pages back into the index and they're well ranked, despite the loss of PR and external backlinks.
