Why Doesn't Google Index My phpBB Forum?

ovidiu · 03-14-2010, 01:37 PM

First, of all, for those who think I didn't search for this before, let me answer a few questions:

- yes, my forum is old enough (almost a year)
- yes my forums are public (they were private for a while but i've made them public for over a month now)
- yes I'm running the latest version of phpbb
- yes, i manually allowed google bot and the other bots to crawl the forum by adding this code to ALL the pages:
<meta name="googlebot" content="index,follow" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
- yes, i've submitted a sitemap to google webmaster tools
- yes, my blog and all my other pages are doing fine in google and they are all hosted on the same domain.
- no, session id is not part of the URL

I would be very grateful if you could give me a few suggestions of things to try, the forum is growing and i could really use the extra traffic from my forum pages.

Thanks!

Mike Anthony · 03-14-2010, 01:53 PM

Any links to your forum??

ovidiu · 03-14-2010, 02:05 PM

I tried but i don't have enough post count to post links. Let me try like this:

www . fiicustil .ro/forum

and remove the spaces

Dennis Wilson · 03-15-2010, 04:14 AM

seems to be indexed fine

site:http://www.fiicustil.ro/forum/ - Google Search

ovidiu · 03-15-2010, 08:11 AM

I know about that but none of the links are valid, they all lead to the custom 404 not found page. It seems it's indexing bogus pages, none of the real pages are indexed.
And, sure enough, if i search for some text from a random post, it does not find it in Google.

03-14-2010, 01:37 PM	#1
ovidiu Active Warrior Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 32 Thanks: 3 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	Why Doesn't Google Index My phpBB Forum? First, of all, for those who think I didn't search for this before, let me answer a few questions: - yes, my forum is old enough (almost a year) - yes my forums are public (they were private for a while but i've made them public for over a month now) - yes I'm running the latest version of phpbb - yes, i manually allowed google bot and the other bots to crawl the forum by adding this code to ALL the pages: <meta name="googlebot" content="index,follow" /> <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" /> - yes, i've submitted a sitemap to google webmaster tools - yes, my blog and all my other pages are doing fine in google and they are all hosted on the same domain. - no, session id is not part of the URL I would be very grateful if you could give me a few suggestions of things to try, the forum is growing and i could really use the extra traffic from my forum pages. Thanks!

03-14-2010, 01:53 PM	#2
Mike Anthony SEO D'Artagnan War Room Member Join Date: Aug 2009 Posts: 4,980 Thanks: 476 Thanked 1,090 Times in 701 Posts	Re: Why Doesn't Google Index My phpBB Forum? Any links to your forum??
	The World's only Full ongoing, no limit, no question unanswered Mentorship on Building powerful SEO Networks reopened by popular demand for a short time.

03-14-2010, 02:05 PM	#3
ovidiu Active Warrior Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 32 Thanks: 3 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	Re: Why Doesn't Google Index My phpBB Forum? I tried but i don't have enough post count to post links. Let me try like this: www . fiicustil .ro/forum and remove the spaces

03-15-2010, 04:14 AM	#4
Dennis Wilson Active Warrior War Room Member Join Date: Aug 2009 Posts: 64 Thanks: 8 Thanked 3 Times in 3 Posts	Re: Why Doesn't Google Index My phpBB Forum? seems to be indexed fine site:http://www.fiicustil.ro/forum/ - Google Search

03-15-2010, 08:11 AM	#5
ovidiu Active Warrior Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 32 Thanks: 3 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	Re: Why Doesn't Google Index My phpBB Forum? I know about that but none of the links are valid, they all lead to the custom 404 not found page. It seems it's indexing bogus pages, none of the real pages are indexed. And, sure enough, if i search for some text from a random post, it does not find it in Google.