Forum Pages Aren't Being Found on my Site

[JamesBang]

Hey all,

Aplogies if this is the wrong forum to post in or if it's mentioned in an FAQ but I haven't been able to find anything that might answer my question.

I have a forum that I had programmed on my t-shirt site but posts aren't being found by the search engines. Here is an example of a post that can't be found: What is Pop Culture to You?

But the actual forum page can be seen by the search engines (T-shirt Forum - Bang Bang T-Shirts). I have a section of the site in which people can upload t-shirt designs and these can be seen by the search engines and I'm not sure what the difference between the forum pages and the design pages is. Here is an example of a design page that can be found in the search engines: T-shirt Design: wingnut- Bang Bang T-Shirts

Does anyone have suggestions on why this might be happening? Thanks

James

[Big Juice]

Well sir I can't speak for the search engines but I was having a hard time even opening the pages within the forum. IE didn't work properly but Firefox seemed to be OK. There may be an issue with the way you have the site set up or the forum specifically. Myself I would be more concerned with the site working properly for all browsers rather than search engines; what good would it do you to be found but unable to process requests?

[microtekblue]

what you need is a mod rewrite of the url so that the url becomes search engine friendly.

[Orion]

yep yep.. urls are unfriendly.. and I'm not quite sure if they are at all findable by the search engines..

try creating a google site map and yahoo Url list that should help immensely in getting your pages regularly spidered.

[jawn_tech]

Here's a few considerations to...well, consider.

The age of the forum -- I see by all the start dates of the posts, it looks like the forum is only as old as March. Yes, I know pages get listed reasonably quick in Google. But in many cases it still takes some time to be 'found'. Sometimes it has to do with the crawl rate that the bots visit your site.

Did your site change frequently before? The more frequently your site changes with dynamic content, the bots will come more frequently.

Now that you have a forum, and as long as posts are being added regularly, the bots will become regulars as well.

Also, not to fire up a debate, page rank (google) needs time to move downstream to new pages linked from the established pages that have some juice.

Finally the url issue as mentioned before. Just to clarify, search-engine friendly urls will perform better. The urls you have now can and will be indexed. But if you can shrink the url's down to rich keywords, the better off they'll be. Every bit helps.

How to do that? What forum software are you using... Go to their website's help files, support forum, or what have ya's, and look around for a plug-in that will do that. Chances are someone in their user community has already identified the issue and found / created one themselves.

Give it just a bit more time, the forum will take off.

[incrediblehelp]

I dont think it has much to do at all with the URLs being search friendly or not and more to do with you dont have any back links pointing to these URLs.

[Peter (IMC)]

I agree with incredible. Those pages are too deep and have only 1 link to them each. Try linking around a bit. A popular posts section in your home page for example.

[SEO]

I would suggest submitting your forum index page (and/or sub-pages) to digg.com. It should be spidered within 24 hours and in the Google index within a week (usually less). Following incrediblehelp's and Peter (IMC)'s advice will also be very beneficial for you as well.

[luigip]

Hi James,

the site that You have posted is in the index:
What is Pop Culture to You?
MSN knows this site also:
What is Pop Culture to You?

But Your site is crawled very poorly and therefore seldom updated in the index.This is due to the lack of backlinks.
Another point is Your stupid JS-mainnavigation. SEs don't follow JS-links. So without Your footerlinks SEs won't even know Your mainsites.
Get a CSS based mainnavigation.

[JamesBang]

Hi all,

Thanks very much for your responses, they've been very helpful indeed.

Big Juice - Are you using IE6? If so, does anyone know if it's possible to test how a site looks in IE6 if you have IE7 installed? I would preferably like to not have to uninstall IE7!

microtekblue, orion, jawn_tech - I'll look to get the URLs more search engine friendly. The forum is actually a custom creation for our site asp.net. Does anyone know of the best mod rewrites for asp.net 2.0?

incrediblehelp, Peter - I'll certainly make an attempt to get more back links to the forum pages.

SEO - What would be the best context in which to submit any of the forum pages to digg? I don't want to spam it

luigip - Are my footer links not good enough for the search engines then?

Any other tips would be gratefully received. Many thanks to web pro world for making this their featured post!

James