Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
How smart is google at detecting template and content? Some of the patents said it is good at it. I see that google is not able to detect forum templates that well.
AjiNIMC
If I can do it with about 95% accuracy in about 30 lines of Perl, imagine how good google is at it. They are experts at determining template (duplicate html portions of a page) content.
> and content?
Quite good.
> I see that google is not able to detect forum templates that well.
They have Vbulletin nailed so well, that one sysop mailing list is convinced G has a specific section of the indexing algo for Vbulletin templates and content. It is one reason NOT to change the raw html of the default vbulletin template. I would even leave the image and css names the same (even if you change them)
Other dynamic content can be problematic because it is always changing.
>> They are experts at determining template (duplicate html portions of a page) content.
When I removed some of the forum pages from a specific template with a lot of common stuffs like avatars, date, cash points to a much cleaner template it got out of supplement results. 7 out of 10 so far. So I wonder if Google was considering those pages to be duplicate before.
>> They have Vbulletin nailed so well,
I am using phpbb but my templates are very much customized, so no trace of phpbb can be found there. May be that can be a problem.
Thanks again,
Aji
I wonder if you are serving dynamic content? Is there code being inserted in the page (other than content), on the fly?
> phpbb
Why do you think they are not seeing the template?
I would see if you can get it to validate or near validate first and go from there.
My forum is IPB software and I have highly customised both the software and the skin to be more friendly i.e. removed superfluous template bits, hidden signatures from guests/search engines, produced a superb robots file with pattern matching... my forum content consistently outranks my static content and on some keywords, even outranks Wikipedia.
However, a huge competitor in my niche (extremely successful website) has made zero effort to optimise their IPB installation... multiple versions of their threads in the index, such as print versions, etc etc... yet they have 40 percent of their forum content in the main Google index (i.e. not supplemental) and it seems that their incoming links are so powerful, dupe issues are meaningless to them. They are an Alexa top 20,000 website purely on their forum traffic.
