Author Topic: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6 (Read 40,913 times)

mouser · « **on:** June 03, 2008, 02:57 AM »

DonationCoder homepage as Google PageRank 6 for a while and then dropped to PageRank 5 for over a year for some reason.

Just thought I'd mention that we seem to be PageRank 6 again.

I think it's mostly useless information, but for those curious, here is more on what PageRank is: http://google.about.com/od/searchengineoptimization/a/pagerankexplain.htm

nudone · « **Reply #1 on:** June 03, 2008, 05:05 AM »

cody tells me that wtfcody.com has a page rank of 11 (or it might have had a pagerank of orange; he wasn't certain), which might explain why DC's page rank dropped when i temporarily made cody's website unavailable.

that's cody's theory, not mine - i don't understand such things.

mouser · « **Reply #2 on:** June 03, 2008, 08:14 AM »

mouser · « **Reply #3 on:** January 03, 2011, 02:18 AM »

looks like our forum pagerank which was 7 is gone completely now that we moved and simplified the forum urls from /forum/ to /forum/, even though we have a permanent redirect. not sure if that's something to be concerned about or not..

Renegade · « **Reply #4 on:** January 03, 2011, 02:41 AM »

Quote from: mouser on January 03, 2011, 02:18 AM

looks like our forum pagerank which was 7 is gone completely now that we moved and simplified the forum urls from /forum/ to /forum/, even though we have a permanent redirect. not sure if that's something to be concerned about or not..

Give it some time. It should recover.

40hz · « **Reply #5 on:** January 03, 2011, 03:03 AM »

Just checked over at checkpagerank.net. They show you as 6/10.

[attach]

mouser · « **Reply #6 on:** January 03, 2011, 03:40 AM »

40hz, yeah like i said the main site pagerank is fine.
It's the forum pages that used to be pagerank 7 and are now 0: http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php

40hz · « **Reply #7 on:** January 03, 2011, 05:08 AM »

Mea culpa. You did say that didn't you? Sorry if I misunderstood.

In that case +1 w/Renegade. Likely Google feels it needs to be rechecked for some reason. You should see that take place within the next few days.

BTW: Good luck getting a straight answer from Google as why it happened.

mouser · « **Reply #8 on:** January 25, 2011, 07:08 AM »

Month later after the server move, the forum is still pagerank 0 and homepage down to 5.

Oh well, I guess one cannot expect to understand the ways of the almighty google -- best thing is just get used to the new position in the caste system of the internet.

Addendum: looks like the forum in Janurary has done about HALF the normal traffic for a month -- i have no idea if that's because of google, but it seems pretty clear that the server move caused a huge loss of traffic.

Maybe it will solve itself eventually.

mahesh2k · « **Reply #9 on:** January 25, 2011, 07:37 AM »

Google pagerank (fake) changes every 3, 4,6,9 months every time on toolbar or any random site. Last pagerank update few weeks ago was made after 9 months of hibernation. Don't bother with this fake pagerank, google has it's own trustrank (internal and not published) that should be important for search results. Have you checked compete and google trends to see how much search traffic is coming to forums or front page ?

By the way search results in google are not affected by pagerank. I can have pagerank 0 for years and hold no 1 or any position in page 1. SEO is changed a lot last 2-3 years.

mouser · « **Reply #10 on:** January 25, 2011, 07:42 AM »

Quote

By the way search results in google are not affected by pagerank.

right, which is google's little joke -- and the punchline is:

Quote

google has it's own trustrank (internal and not published)

whatever -- i need to not think about these things -- it just makes me angry if i do. google does whatever the hell they want and we should just get used to it and take it and keep quiet.

mahesh2k · « **Reply #11 on:** January 25, 2011, 07:55 AM »

By the way, do see why the data to google is not available after april 2010.

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=donationcoder.com&geo=all&date=2010&sort=0

I guess traffic started falling from search after April. My observation is that forums with human-readable URL's (/forum/topic-name.html etc) are likely to get crawled and sorted easily by google. Take example of Vbulletin and IPB forums compared to SMF/PhpBB.

mouser · « **Reply #12 on:** January 25, 2011, 07:57 AM »

now im REALLY confused. wtf happened in that chart -- i don't understand at all what happened. help?

mahesh2k · « **Reply #13 on:** January 25, 2011, 08:25 AM »

Check results of these two queries:

Quote

site:donationcoder.com

site:donationcoder.com/forum/

1. 5,880 results

2. 2,680 results

Many pages are not yet re-indexed by the spider. I guess have to wait till they re-index/recrawl those pages. By the way is forum using redirection ? for redirecting from old URL format to new ? if not then many old links from other sites are dead and also lost the linkvalue from google.

mouser · « **Reply #14 on:** January 25, 2011, 08:27 AM »

yes its using a permanent redirect from old forum url addresses to new.

can anyone explain the google chart mahesh linked above, and explain why it suddenly stops in april? i just dont get that.

mahesh2k · « **Reply #15 on:** January 25, 2011, 08:35 AM »

I think it falls below the threshold of the google trends so they stopped it from showing the results. I have only 100 posts on onecore but with monthly views of 10,200 to 10,700 and still not in the threshold of google trends.

One suggestion : sign-up to google webmaster and add meta tag at header.php of smf. Once they confirm the key from that tag, they'll show you the indexed pages in google, keywords and REAL traffic that is coming from the search engines.

I'll get back to this after checking compete and quantserve results.

mahesh2k · « **Reply #16 on:** January 25, 2011, 08:53 AM »

There seems to be something wrong about traffic analysis sites because all are showing inability for results after apr-may 2010. But atleast for US traffic estimated graph looks good to me.

http://www.quantcast.com/donationcoder.com

mouser · « **Reply #17 on:** February 16, 2011, 06:57 PM »

It's now 2 months after our server move.

We used to have posts on the forum being indexed by google so fast that they are in the search engine a day or two after a post,

And now 2 months after our move I cannot find a single forum post from the recent past (i went back many moths before the server move) in the google search engine.

While the main site pages are still indexed, the forum seems to have been basically dissapeared from the google search engine.
our site maps are parsed and judged correct by google web analytics, but completely and explicitly ignored (and there is no way to figure out why).

And i can't find any way to get anyone's attention at google, no idea how to find out what's wrong, no idea how to correct it, who to complain to, etc.

And people wonder why i have a negative view of google.

If anyone can help, knows someone to contact, or is willing to help -- please help. I am just giving up -- It's just too frustrating for me, I can't handle these kinds of things.

mahesh2k · « **Reply #18 on:** February 16, 2011, 08:49 PM »

Why not submit request to reconsideration for indexing from google.com/webmasters ? That is one way to get forum re-indexed. Do take a look at the frequency of crawler from webmasters dashboard. Also do check robots.txt. Make sure 'disallow:' filed is empty. AFAIK, this looks like 301 being ignored by crawlers and thats why forum is not appearing in search.

mouser · « **Reply #19 on:** February 16, 2011, 08:53 PM »

here's the redirect in our .htaccess: RedirectMatch permanent ^/Forums/bb(.*)$ http://www.donationcoder.com/forum$1

and here's the robots.txt: http://www.donationcoder.com/robots.txt

i have submitted the "request" to reindex the site.

worstje · « **Reply #20 on:** February 16, 2011, 09:02 PM »

Robots should automatically make sense of 301 permanent redirects and hook them up. Google definitely should. If it does not, it is the most stupid bot ever, and I doubt Google has such stupid programmers.

mahesh2k · « **Reply #21 on:** February 16, 2011, 09:04 PM »

Do one thing, remove all the disallow entries for now. Make it look like this:

Quote

Sitemap: http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/forumsitemap.php
User-agent: *
Disallow:

I'll post what to include in disallow in few minutes.

mouser · « **Reply #22 on:** February 16, 2011, 09:09 PM »

i dont want to upload a blank robots.txt -- bad thinks happen when you do that on the forum -- bots start trying to index pages and pages of search results.

mahesh2k · « **Reply #23 on:** February 16, 2011, 09:16 PM »

Eh ? then how do you want forum to get indexed without bots ?

current robots.txt is restricting google bots(or any other bot) from indexing forum. You can choose admin/login/logout/reply/notify/mark to disallow.

mouser · « **Reply #24 on:** February 16, 2011, 09:20 PM »

sorry if i was inelegant.. what i was saying is that a blank disallow makes the robot walk into the SEARCH results page, and indexing incredible amounts of duplicate content by indexing specific searches. just image it trying to index 10,000 pages of search results of searching for the term "the".

the disallows are important in blocking the search bot from treating every page of every page of SEARCH RESULTS as an independent content page on the site.

the disallows are important not just for blocking areas that are private (administration areas) but also links that lead to duplicate content that is better indexed on other canonical pages of the forum.

the goal is to have google index the topic pages (of the form http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=13531).

Same can be said for blocking the search indexing bot from drying to duplicate index every page by indexing both its normal form and the identical content delivered by the
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=printpage;topic=13531.0 links that exist for every page.

The insane part is that we go to the trouble of creating a full sitemap for google.. then have a way for web masters to tell them about the sitemap. they have a configuration page where they will test it and report on it. and then they completely ignore it and have no way of letting you find out why they are completely disregarding it. brilliant. it would be comical if it wasn't so god d*amn insanely stupid and frustrating: