No, it's not because of the URLs. The missing of AOU on google (or other search engines) is my mistake. The "Bots" (crawler) group that the forum assigns those to automatically had no read permissions on the site (they had none set, which reverts to no).Demoder wrote:If I search for "Anarchy Online Universe" on google, AO-U pops up as hit #4 - with an invalid (old site style URI) article.
If I search for some AOU guide on google, AOU doesn't show up anywhere near the top.
I suspect this is because we don't use search-engine-friendly URLs.
The parameter settings in the google webmaster tools is new (well, been a while i looked on them last), i set things accordingly for the page.Demoder wrote: If changing the URLs are too much hassle (it probably is), Khuri might want to look into using the google web tools (and similar tools for other search engines) to instruct the engines which parameters are important; Such as saying that the parameters "id", "mid", and "pid" should be used to identify a page.
Also i've improved the default sitemap-generation tool i use for the cms by default to work better with the website and it's special modules. It catches all default pages now.
http://www.ao-universe.com/sitemap.xml
This should help us get the page back on top for google searches as soon as it gets crawled again.
Seeing as the generation takes place in less then a 10th of a second, i'll maybe upgrade it soon to index the whole forum as well.
...
As for the long URIs and the "site"-variable, this one has indeed no effect at all. It's simply a search engine quirk, having keywords in the URL can affect search results positive. So it more or less "emulates" the rewrite stuff other websites do using virtual folders. I wonder why no one does that, because it does work (got enough websites to show )... but a mod rewrite function is on my long to-do list as nice alternative for servers that support it.
The URI-encoding is to avoid issues. Also a space is a +, not a -. 99% of my normal clients give a damn about what's in the URL bar of their browser, as long as it looks good on the search engine results.
But i am open for suggestions regarding this site. It's a nice place to try out tweaking things, as you and i have already discussed
Yes... well, the CMS has the "search forum"-string in it's language file, the forum just has "search".Silvana wrote:Weird, if you're not on a forum page, it shows "Search Forum..." in that box, which makes it a little more obvious what it is for, but any forum pages, it just says "Search..." If it could be changed to show the forum part always, that would go a long way.
I'll have to adjust that.
Will also add the "combine forum/guides/whole website into one big search"-request to the to-do list. That should be possible.