As you might know recently miniBB has been moved from minibb.net to minibb.com and that resulted in completely losing traffic from Google for quite few months. This was specially disappointing for me, because it seems we did everything correctly regarding SEO terms, setting up the proper 301 redirection via Apache's .htaccess like it's recommended in all SEO guides (and which is correct), and for example, MSN or Yahoo report now absolutely correct results if you type miniBB in a search box. It's cool to see everything related to miniBB on their first results pages, and it means "a conclusion" of 2 major search engines we did everything correctly.

On Google, first of all, we have lost our "6" Page Rank which was recently for miniBB.net; however for some reason within certain period of time this rank lowered, but miniBB.com raised up from "0" to "6". Since we planned to move to miniBB.com anyway, it was a right time to swap our ranks, but it resulted in nothing for miniBB.net as for now, and only "2" for miniBB.com.

After this I only can say that I don't believe in SEO things anymore, and specially I don't give any kind of importance to Google's Page Rank, which was just a good PR itself. I didn't believe in them too much in the past, but now I must say it's really a time to concentrate on the real work, not on what major companies advertise.

This all looks specially suspicious because miniBB website and forums look still indexed well in Google and are referenced by about million of other pages.

As a proof of what I think, I analyzed from our statistics that we didn't lose in traffic a lot, because in the past there were not so many results from Google as from other Internet resources which mention miniBB. And clicking on one of referrers, I've come to the Ukrainian version of Google. The link to miniBB forums there is listed in very strange context which is, I am sure, is not related to our website anyway, because we have a limitation from 2Checkout to not place an adult material (and by the way, why would we do this?.. we have a software website, nothing related to porn).

Sad you Englishmen do not know Ukrainian, but whatever was typed in Ukrainian version of Google means "Hard Porn For Free" in kind of slang form. Here is the screen shot I've took of this results page:



I've marked our forums link appearing at the last page of search results.

Definitely, this "headers already sent" topic deserves to be called a hard porn! :-)

Do you know that such large system like Google is full of bugs? We can't build the science on errors.

It's interesting, I also remember that minibb.com had PR 6 in the first couple (or few) weeks after being moved from minibb.net. There must be a bug or some kind if intentional tweaks to "fool" webmasters.

In recent blog posts Google suggests to use "Webmaster Tools" so that to put their hands on your code too (with usually no gain for webmaster). So focusing on good content and on the user is the way to go indeed.

Recently I like www.live.com more and more (also because of a new interesting design) so as visitors suggest there is no much gain or loss if site is not "strong" in Google.

Дааа... Я долго ржал над этой "ёблей"......

Programmers' life is hard.



Paul, didn't you think that for newbies minibb could be difficult in modifying? And putting such topic you only gave more chances to google thinking is related to f**cking ;-)

coder
nice t-shirt ;-)

I think putting just one topic with the word 'porn' in it won't bring any profit for us, thus it's not having an adult content anyway. It's just another reason to think of Google techniques... they are not perfect we must say. They complicated the simple idea of the effective search engine a lot and now we have such results... sad :-(

Paul, I don't believe in PR too, but I had a good experience by using "Google Webmaster Tools Service" to submit my forum pages.
Before using "Google Webmaster Tools" only 58000 pages of my forums were indexes by google, just 3 weeks after submitting my site maps it increases to more than 150K pages.
Also according to Google Analytics reports my forum visitors are increased by %20, (Results shown that before submitting my sitemaps only %24 visitors where coming from google but now %38 users are coming from google!)

I even didn't use standard sitemap format , and just created some files contains the URLs of forums, topics and users profiles, I use some simple php code,
for example here is the code for users sitemap:

there are some simple codes for topics and forums pages too, they just create some URL list files. I'm working on them to make a standard sitemap version code for minibb.

Danny2000
I've never used Google Webmaster Tools, mostly because I have yet to find out why Google doesn't index all pages correctly without any additional help. It shouldn't be difficult to find and index all pages for them.

But if it helps so radically it could be worth it indeed. Maybe a general code and tutorial how to use it on MiniBB would be possible to post in a new thread :).

PS. Do you run this site on a shared host or VPS/dedicated?

Danny2000
The question here is not about why pages are not indexed by Google. The whole miniBB website is perfectly indexed even without Google maps. Yes there is only about 2,000 pages indexed, but truly this is all we have for miniBB. We have our forums and content very clean and enough. I am also sure miniBB-based forums are indexed perfectly for anybody else using it. There can't more simpler HTML markup and a clean code. It should be indexed by any search engine very well.

The question here is why miniBB forums topic is listed when you type "hard porn for free" in Ukrainian. I am not satisfied with such kind of search result, because our project is not related to porn at all, there are no keywords related, nowhere, no content, and specially in this thread which comes up. It's the same like your adult forums would be found by the keyword "car washing", people looking for car washing techniques are redirected to the adult site for some reason. In our case, even if you type "miniBB" in Google now - what else could be related to miniBB, except the website hosted on the top premium domain www.minibb.com, which is full of content about miniBB, techniques, downloads??? But this site is mentioned somewhere on the 5-7th page...

I think this is NOT right definitely. I would wonder how Coca-Cola would claim Google, if you type "Coca Cola" and then the company's site is not appearing as the first in search results. But instead, they analyze logs and see that people are coming to their website searching for sex, drugs, rock'n'roll... it would be a madness.

I rather doubt that website owners should worry about Google techniques at all. It's a major company and IT should worry about the quality of their database, not us. Why this all perfectly works for Yahoo and MSN? This Google-mania tired me a lot.

There are so much people actually working for Google for free! And they do not understand it. They do not understand that the money they receive from Google ads, can't be called a profit comparing to what Google earns on them. In comparison it's a milk money. And all these techniques, strategies, SEO guides... don't you understand that you are helping the major company to be even more large, even more rich?.. You can't win the casino if you start playing there...

As I said, we can perfectly live without Google, because traffic is not lost this days, but only increased. It all is because we didn't care about Google techniques initially. I recommend to do the same for everybody else - forget about lame science and promote your website on related directories, forums, catalogs... It brings more efforts else sitting day and night and calculating your Page Rank.

You can do whatever you want with Google maps (and for sure you are welcome to submit your codes and solution for other users which might be interested in it), but I think I personally won't even spend a second to look into this. I have more important and interesting things to do, thus much more profitable.

I completely agree about Paul's statements Google and their "voluntary workers" program, so many webmasters have been duped into this ring; some of them still believe Google is a non-profit organization and doing a free job for them is actually a privilege ;)..

Anyway, I think miniBB's ranking on "porn" keywords is because many sites powered by miniBB (some of them hacked and hosting sex/porn links) host adult content.

When adding the fact that most of them link back to minibb.com, Google spiders may think miniBB may also have "adult" theme. It's silly of them, but I feel that's how their bots read it.

I agree with you and that may be the reason.

But this is kind of over-complicated method of building a keyword-database for the sites. It's strange. Then I can say miniBB could be related to almost any topic on earth, not just forum software. As I know our customers, their subjects are very various. That doesn't bring a lot of prestige to Google.

Being a programmer I don't believe in random happenings, but today I was shocked to know another bad news about Google. It's specially curious that I didn't know about it all when posting my Google bug report, i.e. the first message in this thread.

As you all might know, US mass-media are actively washing brains of US citizens claiming Russia as an 'aggressor' vs. Georgia. Just few days ago on YouTube, there was posted a Fox News video clip where they interviewed Amanda Kokoeva, a 12-year old girl and her aunt currently living in US, but which were caught in the war conflict right in the cafe. Later they were lucky enough to get into Moscow and flight back.

The most important is this video is the interviewer, I don't know his name, but he deserves the "polished bastard" title, as they said in comments. And polished bastard feels nervous as soon as the girl thanks Russian troops, but woman starts claim Saakashvili calling HIM an aggressor and the person who started the war and who must be punished (which is definitely THE TRUE), the interviewer cuts off the interview, first saying they should switch to ads block, and then saying their time is over.

In result the interview lasts about 3 minutes only and it is obvious that nobody from the bought-off mass-media is interested to tell Americans the true. Amanda's aunt was giving this interview in the 'open air' by purpose, she denied to talk to media if they record it in advance and then cut off the "unnecessary" parts.

On YouTube, this video became a bomb straight away, but its staff was obviously told to block number of visits to this video to hide the huge amount of people interested in it. It resulted in many thousands of comments claiming YouTube and Sergey Brin, the Google's founder and director. As you might know, Google now owns YouTube, and it obviously operates it on a level which is requested by some other people "from top". Later all of these comments were removed.

Now this video is duplicated in hundreds of copies on YouTube and obviously NOW nobody knows how many people in total have watched it. Except of course, YouTube admins know it.

There is no true on Google, guys, it proves it again...

Did you hear about Google bomb?
Maybe somebody add some links to that page somewhere, I mean somebody add this link on his/her website, weblog, forums, etc :

<a href=https://www.minibb.com/forums/9_5179_0.html>hard porn for free(in Ukrainian)</a>
It can cause this issue,

I'll do that ;-)

It's on a dedicated server,

I know the miniBB has clean and simple html cods, that's why I love it. I think Google and another search engine robots have problem with non-English character codes (especially Persian language), that's why my website was not index properly.

From the SEO point of view that would be a "correct" move, but I really doubt this SEO technique works. In that case it would be possible to create some separated domain, kind of links directory, and fulfill it with links pointing to enemies websites, but with wrong keywords in URLs. On another hand, it would be also possible to fulfill it with links to your own site, but specifying correct keywords in URLs.

I think when determining contextual quality of the site, Google must take completely other techniques. Else it could be called a lamers achievement.