After the most recent Google update we have seen some very weird things happening. CLF dropped about 120,000 indexed pages, and ZU dropped much more. Quite frankly I am frazzled by this because my notion of what duplicate content should be is nowhere near what I think Google should be recognizing it as. Personally, I think if you show your content in different mediums then that is not duplicate content. Yet according to Google it may be counted as such.
So, I have read over threads like this, and noticed people blocking a portions within their forum and then blocking out the archive. I don’t think this is a bad thing, but I honestly don’t see the showthread page as being very optimized and it has a pleathera of images. Lee and I have decided on CLF to disallow the whole /forum/ and only allow /archive/. Now you might think you have heard it all and we have flown the coop, but we have some proof of this.
As I said earlier CLF and ZU have dropped 90%+ of their pages in the update and we allowed the crawling of everything. Yet I didn’t mention SU which dropped 0% of it’s pages in the update and we allow only the crawling of the /archive/ , could this be a fluke? I am willing to bet it’s not. And to be quite honest on most of the forums I have ever owned or administrated, I have found the archive to be a great source of traffic and the pages index in the SEs much better.
So we shall see what happens, and report back.
Rex of CruiseLineForums.com
Interesting, it makes a lot of sense that Google would be able to see that as duplicate content.
It’s too bad that vBulletin’s archive ‘templates’ are so hard to adjust, straight in the code.
I would really like to hear your updates on this. I am currently running vbSEO with the archive disabled, and it never has been enabled. I might do some testing with this as well.
Several forums lost tons of indexed pages in the last update. My current showthread pages do not rank well and since turning off the archive a few months ago, I depend on my main site to bring traffic to my forum.
I may enable this as well. If nothing else, it could provide for a quicker indexing of my archive.
How long has sprint users been using this technique?
I would like To hear more about this because i’m also having some problem with google .. i use to parket a domain name and later i read some thread that Google Banned the parket domain name so i removed them know i’m having problem google index my forum thread ..