Snitz forums not indexed anymore

Internal pages PR0

[Marketing Guy]

I noticed this some time back and was either too drunk or too tired to remember to look into it! :)

One of my forums that uses Snitz free forum software has all it's internal pages PR0 and not indexed, where previously (a few months back) they held a PR relative to the site and the content was indexed.

I checked the Snitz support forums - same deal.

I checked another site of mine with Snitz running - same again.

Fortunately I havent seen much loss of traffic as naturally none of my forum pages are optimised for any particular keyword.

But still, I'd like to get to the bottom of it.

The software displays pages using the following syntax:

www.domain.com/forum/topic.asp?topic_id=12345

I assume that this isn't a problem unless google has recently changed the way they index things.

I also assume that they wouldn't inncur a broad penalty - maybe one site, but not lots of unrelated sites.

The only thing I could think of is the link to Snitz at the bottom of each page generated - could they be PR0'd in order to negate any backlink value to the parent company?

Any thoughts or further info on this?

Cheers
Scott

[dazzlindonna]

Googleguy mentioned once a while back that having ID in the url can be interpreted by googlebot as a session id and it would avoid it. That *might* be your problem.

[GoogleGuy]

"topic_id" should be okay--I think it's just "id" that can cause problems. How big are the numbers for the topic_id parameter? If they get big enough, that could do it in theory. I'd recommend shorter params (e.g. for a numeric field, 1-9999 might be better than 99999 through 99999999 or higher).

[markus007]

Googleguy i had the same problem with some of my pages.

/states.asp?state_id=12

was getting crawled but would never get PR, i rewrote the URL and everything was fine. I had a bunch of links off my homepage, and a couple where always graybared because they where of the form /defualt.asp?page_id=2 none of the id's i used ever went over 100

[richardb]

GoogleGuy

The forum that Marketing_Guy is talking about has topic ids are 5 digits or less.

Until Florida is ranked very well for many topics, not just topic/subject specifics.

HTH

Rich

[Marketing Guy]

Thanks for the responses! :)

As Rich said, all the numbers are less than 4 digits.

Ive looked into it a bit more on their support forums.

One member showed me his site that was doing the same thing - the internal pages (forum.asp and topic.asp) were showing PR0.

But, on a search for "forum title site:www.domain.com" all his posts were showing up (perhaps a hundred or so which was accurate for his forum post count).

I tried the same and found that a lot of the internal forum pages (perhaps half of them) were turning up and indeed had some PR relative to the site (HP is PR6, so they all had PR1 to PR3).

However as Rich said, some internal pages were PR0 and not indexed (I googled for chunks of text) and these were pages I know for a fact were indexed previously.

There was also no decernable logic to which had PR and which didnt - some very old posts that had been bumped a few pages back had PR, some didnt - some newer posts had PR some didnt.

Just for reference, Ive monitored the rest of the site (non forum), perhaps more so than I watched the forum pages - and although there was minor movement in the SERPs over the past few months, all retained relative rankings and the same PR.

As I said, I havent seen much in the way of traffic decrease (other than seasonal fluctuations which I expected), so Im not that bothered - just hate seeing that white bar at the top of some of my forum posts! :)

Cheers
Scott