Originally posted by Kaniaz
Googlebot's been tracking this forum for ages. Search for Kaniaz and I appear as number one with these posts.
Ya know, as much as it pains me to have to prove you wrong Kaniaz (because you've been an endless source of inspiration and strength to me ): search engine spiders don't like session IDs. Why, you ask? Quite simply because a URL is not static with a SID; it changes every time. Thus search engines cannot relate URLs-with-SIDs to URLs that they have previously stored in their database; concordantly, every time a search engine would spider our forum they would add an additional copy of every single post to their index, because to them, each page would be unique.
"Session IDs? But I don't see any session IDs." You're probably using cookies; if you log out and view the forum as a guest, you'll suddenly see great big session IDs after every URL! The search engines have been able to only skim the top of the forum: they can see all the topic titles from the main page, and they have also gotten to the tutorials (and some of the other forums) from the new site. BUT, as soon as they got to one of those forums, or to the other links in each post, they were again hindered by the session IDs. If you follow you'll come to the immediate conclusion that none of our actual posts are in google's index...simply some of the titles (and again the tutorials). Names and whatnot will appear, because those are presented on some of the forum entry pages.
What I've done (4 or 5 days ago): I've added a mod that checks the user's agent against a very long list of known bots. If there is a match, the board will not assign a session ID to that guest. Thus, us humans all get SIDs; in the eyes of the bots, however, it is now clear sailing. Google spidered our forum for the very first time yesterday...it made a whole pile of sessions (bringing our record number of online users to 28 from 21), and stuck around for a long time...I had to leave so I don't know how long for sure, but it was still quite busy after 3 hours.
"What does it all mean?" It means the entire forum should become searchable on google within the next few days. I've heard, however, that certain steps have been taken by google to ensure forum posts don't receive that high of page rank; the main site itself is already doing quite well, but I cannot possibly encompass the great range of dream topics that users could be searching for in my keyword list. Thus, I'm hoping our posts will provide a greater number of new entry points for users searching for various things related to lucid dreaming.
If you click this link you'll see everything from our site and forum that google has indexed. Right now there are 39 pages; not 3 as was stated in this thread. If what I've done works--and it should because Google has never spawned so many sessions on our forum and stayed for such a long time--within a few days (or a week or so) thousands of pages should be returned instead of 39.
'k bye
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