SEO test with phorum, part 2
In another post on this blog I talked about a little experiment of mine. Let’s start by recapitulating what was the goal there. Phorum is a discussion board that uses urls with parameters by default. On my own test forum (http://www.dissurion.com/phorum/) I didn’t have much success in getting those urls indexed by the search engines yahoo and google. MSN was no problem at all. So in order to try to get better results in those first two, I tried a plugin that transformed those ugly urls into clean ones.
Now it’s time for the sequel since google seems to have updated datacenters. Let’s start with MSN, since they were the first to have indexed my poor PR0 site to a decent degree. When I ask them to show my pages, they show 32 results. All my blog posts I have published so far are there. Some, but not all, of my phorum posts. When I search msn.com for my magical-test-word (you’ll have to find it in the phorum pages), MSN finds the post, but this post is not listed when I ask to show all the pages of my site. MSN did index the clean urls, though I could find one ugly url together with it’s nice form. This ugly one didn’t show up consistently thoug (most times I repeated the search it didn’t show up).
How’s Yahoo doing? Sigh, my site only comes up on the second page for they keyword “dissurion”. When I click on “more from this site”, displayed when my site shows up in the results, I get … 3 results. Who wouldn’t be disappointed by such search results? What comes up are my main index page, the phorum index page, and my latest blog post. So I decided to search again, but this time with yahoo.fr, which is closest to me (Belgium). Now my page comes up first in the search results (hmm, have to find out more about this). Unfortunately only the same 3 pages are indexed. Well, at least others seem to have the same experience: Yahoo indexing is very slow.
Hello google! Where am I? Seems like I’m in there with 38 pages. All blog posts, all phorum posts, all clean urls. Well, almost: exactly one forum post is missing. When I use the test datacenter at 64.233.179.104 things get more messy. Not all of my posts are indexed, my forum lists are also there with ugly urls (so twice: with nice and ugly urls), and some posts are indexed in a way I can’t figure out how google got it in there that way. If this test center is an indication of future google updates this doesn’t predict future results as good as they are now.
I have to be honest and say I can’t really tell whether google indexed my results when I wrote my first post about this experiment. The forum got into existance probably after an update and before a new update. So to be sure the nice urls really helped, and to what extent, I will have to remove them and see what google will say after the next update. I expect the nice urls to be still there, as google doesn’t seem so fast in deleting obsolete urls. I still have some old urls with ‘dissurion’ in google from the time I still looked at free webhosting, although those sites are completely gone. Since the forum is just sitting there I might as well take advantage of the opportunities it gives me. I have nothing to loose in terms of dropping in the search engines. So I’ll remove those nice urls, and we’ll see what happens next.
So again, to be continued…