[CMS] vBCms Comments - How to prevent search indexing

[DCX000]

I do not want vBCms comment forum posts being displayed in search results but cannot seem to prevent it. In the Forum Manager I have selected NO for Index New Posts In Search Engine but that does not stop it.

When a search is performed for a keyword in one of my articles, the comments forum is displayed before the article which leads people to click and land in the vBCms comments forum, not where I want them to go.

How do you stop the comments forum from being displayed in search results -OR- do I misunderstand how this is supposed to work? Does anyone else want visitors browsing the comments forum? I can't imagine why.

Thanks

[DCX000]

Is everyone else really okay with their comments forum showing up in search results? The more articles I add the worse my search results look. Results are a staggered array of the actual article link followed by the comments forum link with no simple way to distinguish between them.

[Lynne]

Do you have the forum posts set to be indexed in the Forum Manager - Index New Posts in Search Engine? (Default is Yes, I believe.)

[DCX000]

In the Forum Manager I have selected NO for "Index New Posts In Search Engine" but that does not stop it. That doesn't seem right but that's a fact.

Rebuilt search index - Check

Do they show up in your vb searches?

[smnet]

they're showing in mine too.... I cant seem to get rid of them either and agree fully that they should not be there. The whole plan is to mask the fact that comments are handled in a forum.... hgence why vbCMS comments forum doesn't appear in the list of forums.

I am banking on there being a way to achieve this but we have not found it yet..... can anyone shed light onto this?

Thanks

[Reeve of Shinra]

For now, my advice is that you should use your htaccess file to block the spidering of the comments directory and leave the rest alone.

[Lynne]

Are you guys talking about when you do an actual search from the Search page or when you click on New Posts? If you have Indexing off for the forum, then those comment threads should not show up if you do a search via the Search page. However, that is different from click on New Posts, or Posts in the last 24 hours, etc.

[DCX000]

When you do a search from the search page or the search box on any page.

I am not referring to the New Posts link.

I am saying that when you use the search feature to search for keywords in an article's title, the comments forum posts are displayed in search results no matter what you do. I tested this here at vb.com with same results.

I just found a bigger problem for me which is that Google is indexing and displaying my comments forum before the article itself in search results? The comments forum is basically just a title with no comments and Google decided that should be listed instead of a link to the article itself. I'm not blaming vb for what Google does but I am going to have to block this. I think someone mentioned .htaccess up there.

[Lynne]

I would make sure this is entered into the bug tracker (and point to this thread for reference). It sounds like things are not working as designed if you are setting the forum to not be indexed and yet it is being indexed anyway.

[smirkley]

I submitted this with my thoughts and ideas here,..

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/project.php?issueid=35598

Dont know if this is the end solution, but I think this would be a good way to go imho.

[Max Paint]

you can exclude comments by using the usergroup rights for a special forum. Set "Can search this forum" to NO for the Forum "Article comments" for EACH usergroup you have and all thread and posts are excluded from search.

Anyway, I think the "article forum" is a bad solution. If the forum is not excluded from search and we have an article with, let us say "title1" and a user does a search with "title1" he gets TWO results. First the article itself in the CMS and a second one in the article comments forum, because the thread has the same title... You can avoid this (two results for ONE article) by excluding the article forum from search (as I wrote above), but then you cannot search the COMMENTs of the article. So if someone writes an interessting COMMENT to an article in CMS no one will find it, because all comments are just posts of a forumthread that is excluded...

That needs improvement, I would say

By the way I found a graphic in images-folder that is for search results of CMS comments; name of the graphic is "search_results_CMS_comment". I hope I can use it in future

[Merjawy]

Agreed Max

thats what I use, usergroup rights... There is no reason for that forum to show up when searching for new threads