We have noticed that our NAWCC Message Board and other clock and watch related boards that we have recently moved to php/MySQL based technology have disappeared from google and other search engines.
Previously when using UBB Classic for example or earlier web page based message boards the contents of the messages were searchable and specific postings could be found using google.
Does anyone know if the search engine developers are planning to address this problem? From their vantage point large areas of the web, like this message board for instance, are invisible to them.
Has anyone developed a technique to make the contents of their message boards show up in the web crawler searches?
The specific message boards I am concerned with are NAWCC Message Board (http://nawcc-mb.infopop.cc/6/ubb.x) and AWCo Forums (http://www.mcintyre.com/phpBB2/index.php). The first of these is hosted by Infopop while the second is using phpBB. The AWCo Forums formerly used vBulletin with the same results.
You will need to use search engine friendly urls ...
Google (and others) tend to ignore pages like
view.php?id=12&post=13&something=whoknows
There are several ways to do so.
One way is to make your pages look like subdirectories. The above URL would then turn to
view.php/12/13/whoknows
Apache will send the request to view.php and you can get the parameters via the server variables ...
Thanks for the reply.
I don't understand how changing the form of the url would help with the web crawler. Are you saying that the web crawlers execute the url and then search whatever is returned?
Does anyone know why the web crawlers "discriminate" against the parameter form of the url? It seems that if the crawler can execute one url, it could justr as well execute the other.
One does not necessarily have any control over the form of the url''s. For example this thread on Dev Shed has the url http://forums.devshed.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=430049#post430049
I don't think any search engine would actually be able to catalog this thread so someone could find this discussion if they were interested in the topic.
.... and there are changes you can make to change the forums to a more 'search engine friendly' format. I seem to recall it has something to do with editing the headers. If I run across the info again I'll post a link for you here.