The success of the archive hack

[dpkm]

Just wanted to say, with the newest update, battleforums now has 20k+ pages in google: http://www3.google.com/search?hl=en&...m+battleforums

As for the vb3 archive, it doesn't work for betting your posts spidered in google. And someone mentioned above that when you switch to vb3, the old links will all be 404's. That can be fixed with a .htaccess that will redirect users to the proper thread. It can be easily done, or could even just make it so your 404 error page goes directly to your home page.

Edit - Actually, with the latest update, it looks like the vb3 archive does work, somewhat. It isn't exactly "optimized" though... http://www.google.com/search?q=site:...start=120&sa=N - Don't know if google likes it or not.

Hey, great! 20K pages is really boosting your traffic, I'd bet. I didn't want to rag on your efforts - like I said, I'm eagerly awaiting getting my forums in Google. But, from a usability standpoint, redirecting people to your homepage when they hit a 404 error page is not the greatest. .htaccess will do the trick, but I'm not certain how easy it might be. If everything is logical, for those with the ability to do the .htaccess, it certainly is the way to go while vb3 is in development.

Lastly, your link to Google - there are two reasons for those URL-only, no-text-indexed results. 1) Google didn't get the chance to index those pages yet, and it will take a few updates to get it in (but it knows the pages are there!) 2) It is prevented from indexing the page via robots.txt, but it still places a pointer to the page since it knows that the link exists.

As I doubt the archives are being protected by robots.txt, it is more likely that Google will get around to it eventually.