Not getting this forum in my search results anymore

[Haien]

I used to be able to google ebike related stuff and have endles-sphere come up as multiple of the search results, but now I don't get any results from here at all, even when really trying. What is going on?

This is a great resource, and a lot of times google is better than the bult in search function.

 

[neptronix]

Yikes. I checked google and you are correct and i am not happy with what i see.



Thank you so much for letting me know.

I just got done looking into this.
We have all the old forum URLs redirected correctly so google SHOULD have picked those up during the transition.
No settings are preventing our site from being indexed and google says it knows about us..

The culprit might be the xenforo sitemap generation. Apparently our forum is of the size that it splits the sitemap into multiple XMLs and in this case, it's only generating a partial index, in a format some search engines don't understand, which is bad.
I have fixed this by completely removing the sitemap.xml ( old endless sphere didn't have a sitemap.xml and everything was fine, google comes to crawl you either way, but the conflicting data can be a negative )

I set up google search console today and will have more information tomorrow on how google is seeing the site and will start drilling down other possible causes.

Interesting thing: despite this, our traffic is still up since moving to Xenforo. We must have a loyal fanbase.

 

[neptronix]

Here's the problem.
Google thinks there's a robots.txt blocking things but there's zero robots.txt

Google still has links to phpbb that do show up in search on occasion but the results look awful:



From what i can see, google hasn't bothered to reindex our site since the launch of ES 2.0 in Mid-February.



I've went into google's search console and told it to do a re-check on a few things.
I also turned off the crawl-delay setting and i've set the system up to be open wide to getting slammed by google.

Google usually does reindexes of entire sites every summer. We may have to wait for improvement on this - nut sure yet.
More on this next week.

 

[marty]

I am not the expert on this.
Look here:
[Endless Sphere]
Right click - View Page Source

See a lot of HTML mumbo jumbo.

Click Edit > Find in Page

See:
rel="nofollow"
7 times in the page.

Get rid of rel="nofollow" and I think search engines will follow and not nofollow.

Look at the settings in your Xenforo stuff.

 

[neptronix]

Looked it over.

The nofollow attributes are on elements that a search engine shouldn't follow, actually.
Looks like an intentional choice on Xenforo's part and i don't disagree with it. They're trying to steer search engines towards The individual forum lists which is an efficient way for the search engine to try to index the site.

Thanks for doing some sleuthing anyway.
I am not an SEO expert myself, i know how to wrangle servers and code; i am still learning SEO.

I am waiting on results from google rechecking things and hopefully the robots get back to me in a few days..?
If anyone else has some insight, i wouldn't mind the help.

 

[amberwolf]

Unfortunately so far all the SEO "experts" that have ever replied to your old SEO thread were all spammers.... :lol:

We'll probably get some in this thread too now that the term is posted here.

 

[marty]

i am still learning SEO.

Its all about text. Type what ever you think people might search for. If I was looking for a electric bicycle forum? I would type electric bicycle forum into Google. Now see who is at top of page? Copy what they do.

 

[marty]

<title>Endless Sphere</title>

<meta name="description" content="DIY Electric Vehicles and more.." />
<meta property="og:description" content="DIY Electric Vehicles and more.." />
<meta property="twitter:description" content="DIY Electric Vehicles and more.." />

more? Get some more words in there. Look what these guys do.

<meta name="title" content="Home page"/>
<meta name="description" content="Grin Technologies"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="ebikes.ca, Grin Technologies, ebikes, electric bikes, ebike conversion kits, torque arms, lithium batteries, chargers, hub motors, motor controllers, displays, throttles, mid drive, stoke monkey, Ezee, Crystallyte, 9C, "/>
<meta name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW"/>

 

[neptronix]

Unfortunately so far all the SEO "experts" that have ever replied to your old SEO thread were all spammers.... :lol:

We'll probably get some in this thread too now that the term is posted here.

Hopefully; that thread is crusty at the moment but i think there was one legit member i might cold call

 

[neptronix]

<title>Endless Sphere</title>

<meta name="description" content="DIY Electric Vehicles and more.." />
<meta property="og:description" content="DIY Electric Vehicles and more.." />
<meta property="twitter:description" content="DIY Electric Vehicles and more.." />

more? Get some more words in there. Look what these guys do.

<meta name="title" content="Home page"/>
<meta name="description" content="Grin Technologies"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="ebikes.ca, Grin Technologies, ebikes, electric bikes, ebike conversion kits, torque arms, lithium batteries, chargers, hub motors, motor controllers, displays, throttles, mid drive, stoke monkey, Ezee, Crystallyte, 9C, "/>
<meta name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW"/>

Makes sense. The problem is that the forum doesn't generate keywords of it's own. Possibly we could at least slap some on the home page at the very least ( somehow )

From what i hear from SEO people i've worked with here and there, keywords aren't such a big deal because google is going off the content primarily these days.
Correct me if i'm wrong.

And our real problem is that google hasn't fully indexed the new site for about 3 months. This is not something i really have control over either.

Prophecy has it that google goes on indexing rampages during june-july. I have even had to intervene with a few clients when this indexing activity went absolutely nuts and it's always during summer.

I'll check in with what google has to say next week; other than that, can you join me in prayer for rain..

 

[neptronix]

Looks like we have liftoff here..
Will recheck and adjust in a few weeks

 

[neptronix]

Still improving since the generated sitemap removal.. go endless sphere, go!

 

[A-DamW]

Dang, nice work!
I noticed today a couple of times in the afternoon (Pacific time) I got a http:500 error sitewide(multiple tabs/threads open) while logged in and browsing.

 

[neptronix]

Thanks for letting me know; i did hear of this at about 7:30am ( Utah time )

OK.. so the problem?
We had an in-memory SQL table hit a logical limit last night around midnight and it blew the whole thing up.

Symptom: 500 error, whoops error, or garbage about xf_session_activity being full

So MySQL sets this in-memory table to 16mb by default... turns out to be way too small for our database size x amount of users..
I've adjusted that to 128mb so let's see what happens.

According to the Xenforo forum, other large forums have this issue and we also had a problem like this with phpbb.

Looks like totally uncorking the search engine settings was part of this overload.. over the last 5 days the server load has doubled... nutty



Let me know if you continue to have problems... i *think* the server should be stable now but i'm going to check in over the weekend too..

 

[neptronix]

I just tweaked the SEO a little bit to invite even more search bots and upped that limit to 256mb, let's see what happens
I'll make sure to check in over the weekend because i have made a decent amount of changes here and don't know how the forum will be affected by it. Cross your fingers that this is the fix.

 

[neptronix]

Checking in one last time.
The numbers look like what i expect for ES, but they seem to be climbing beyond last year's peak ( 2.9K ).

If this is an accurate indicator, i'd say i fixed the problem.

Outside of my bird's eye system administrator view, how's searchability on google vs 1 month ago?

 

[goatman]

why arent the view counts on threads changing, i noticed every time i log in and post to the bayliner thread my view count is always 15,192, i really dont care what the count is i just notice it doesnt change

 

[nicobie]

I checked and it's not moving for me either.

To bad about the monster fish!

 

[neptronix]

According to the Xenforo forum, the counter increments every hour to save CPU. ( this is smart )
So, you won't see an instant change.

I believe it also doesn't count views when a user views a thread again. But haven't digged into the database structure to confirm yet.
This could be why numbers on Xenforo don't look as good as phpBB.

 

[amberwolf]

To bad about the monster fish!

?

 

[nicobie]

?

Goatman posted a vid about almost catching a very large sturgeon from his Bayliner boat.

 

[amberwolf]

Oh; I don't see those posts here at my end.

 

[nicobie]

 

[goatman]

oh Nicobie, you have such a pure heart
i think AW was saying he blocks all my posts

 

[nicobie]

I didn't notice the