Forum Moderators: goodroi
This doesn't seem to be an issue for Yahoo, MSN, Ask, or any of the others. Just Google. I have fixed the double slash issue, returning a 301 to the correct URL with the single slash. I have also set up the forum to use cookies, which eliminates most of the session IDs.
However, my site is still doing horribly in Google for the most part. I do have a few pages returning #1 results, but for the most part the other pages do not rank anywhere near where I feel they should for their keywords, based on the pages that do rank well.
So, I've added my /forum/ to the robots.txt disallow list for all SEs. If my forum is pulling my site down, I don't mind not having it listed until I'm able to implement a fix for it. (I need to upgrade, which means buying a license and I haven't had time to mess with it - it's an Invision Board).
If I were to only exclude Googlebot from the forum, would that send out signals to Google that there's something wrong there? I haven't intentionally tried to do anything sneaky, but I didn't know it was configured wrong when it went online 2 years ago. About 2 months after it went online, my site dropped in Google, and has never recovered.
I don't want to create more problems for myself than I already have, but I'm not really sure what else to do at this point.
It spiders what you say it can, it ignores the rest (mostly).
But much better to fix the problem.
If you have a Google problem but not M$N/Y!, chances are it's a link problem.
And if it's a forum, chances are it's a link problem.
Forums allow third parties to post links on your site; consider stopping siggies; and - of course - you are using nofollow for the link drops? No? Well, there's your answer! :)
