Most of my vb forum gone supplemental, now what to do?

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  • cgc99
    Member
    • May 2004
    • 57

    Most of my vb forum gone supplemental, now what to do?

    I have been following the latest google update(big daddy) and reading everything I can. It seems there are quite a few posts that mention forums getting hit hard by the supplemental serps in google.

    However, I have not seen any mention of it here. Am I the only one experiencing this?

    I have been modifying my robots.txt file to try to remove some of the duplicate filter/penalty/whatever you want to call it.

    Any thoughts from the developers?

    thanks for any advice
  • feldon23
    Senior Member
    • Nov 2001
    • 11291
    • 3.7.x

    #2
    Google is a sealed box, subject to the whim of 1 company, that we can't look into . It astounds me that fortunes are made and lost based on it.
    Last edited by feldon23; Tue 4 Apr '06, 4:16am.

    Comment

    • Scott MacVicar
      Former vBulletin Developer
      • Dec 2000
      • 13286

      #3
      There was a post on the google blog that there is no such penalty for duplicate content.

      Search optimization is a very dynamic industry, we dont have the desire or need to make a new release everytime one of the major players changes an algorithm slightly.

      Usability and performance over making google happy.
      Scott MacVicar

      My Blog | Twitter

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      • cgc99
        Member
        • May 2004
        • 57

        #4
        Scott,

        Are you saying the there are not a ton of VB sites getting hit with supplemental results? I'm one of the few?

        I can understand a wait and see attitude but your response is pretty arrogant considering google is the major search engine. It is usually responsible for 50%+ of peoples traffic.

        If vb doesn't do fairly well in the serps because of design issues, webmasters will find a forum software package that does.

        I kind of expected a response from the developers that said, "we are monitoring the google situation and will make the appropriate modifications when we determine that it is necessary".

        Comment

        • Scott MacVicar
          Former vBulletin Developer
          • Dec 2000
          • 13286

          #5
          It's not arrogant its the truth, optimizing for google is more than a full time job and its a dynamic industry. There are other search engines out there and we are trying to balance with usability and keeping everything cross platform.

          Using mod_rewrite with Apache is not an appropriate solution just so people can keep google happy as it will alienate anyone who decides to use IIS or any other web server.

          Read http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80


          It's been found that if google finds duplicate content on the same site it will choose to ignore one of the copies, its only when the same content appears on multiple sites that a penalty comes into effect.

          We use rel="nofollow" for half of the links on vBulletin anyway and are possibly introducing error codes for other pages to stop anyone indexing it but thats about all we shall be doing.
          Scott MacVicar

          My Blog | Twitter

          Comment

          • cgc99
            Member
            • May 2004
            • 57

            #6
            thanks for the followup information.

            I made my original post because of the numerous posts on the web stated many sites are going almost completely supplemental results. As well as many vb forum sites.

            I just did a quick check on my forum using
            site:mydomain.com "title of thread" This thread was started 2/15/06

            Google reported 16 results and all are supplemental.
            I do not have vbseo or any mod-rewrite mods installed on my forum.

            Comment

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