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Contribs.org Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: mmccarn on February 20, 2017, 03:18:55 PM

Title: Forum discussion missing from Google Search results
Post by: mmccarn on February 20, 2017, 03:18:55 PM

I recently went looking for a forum discussion I participated in in early January.

Usually a simple google search will get me back to a past discussion quite easily using "site:contribs.org <search term here>".

However, as of this morning I cannot find any word in this discussion that will cause a google search to succeed:
How to update completely and properly a SME? (https://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,52795.msg272400.html#msg272400)

To find the discussion I eventually had to do this:
- look through ~/.bash_history on the system I used to test things
- use the forum search function to look for one of the words included in the command ("repoquery")

Looking at the source code for the discussion in question, I noticed this directive, which will prevent the post from being included in google search results:

Code: [Select]

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />


Title: Re: Forum discussion missing from Google Search results
Post by: Stefano on February 20, 2017, 04:59:16 PM

please, open a bug, thank you

Title: Re: Forum discussion missing from Google Search results
Post by: mmccarn on February 21, 2017, 12:31:07 PM

Bug 10104 (https://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10104)

Title: Re: Forum discussion missing from Google Search results
Post by: mmccarn on February 23, 2017, 01:10:30 PM

This behavior is a design feature of the Simple Machines Forum software to improve search ranking by preventing duplicate indexes of the same content:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=254298.0


The problem seems to be with Google, and not with the SME forum software or settings.

As of this writing, the search below does not return the forum topic in question with Google, but *does* return the topic I want in Yahoo:
site:contribs.org "repoquery"

Google Search: site:contribs.org "repoquery" (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acontribs.org+%22repoquery%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)
- 4 results; all on 'bugs.contribs.org'; none related to the forum topic I wanted

Yahoo search: site:contribs.org "repoquery" (https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=site%3Acontribs.org+%22repoquery%22)
- 1 result - the forum topic I was looking for


[edit]
I noticed this post about switching search engines:
https://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,52828.msg272622.html#msg272622

duckduckgo finds the post using the search for repoquery:
DuckDuckGo Search: site:contribs.org "repoquery" (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Acontribs.org+"repoquery")
- 1 result - the forum topic desired

startpage does not find anything
Startpage does not have an API for linking directly to a search... (https://www.startpage.com/do/search)
- no results at all

Title: Re: Forum discussion missing from Google Search results
Post by: Shinya Fujita on April 09, 2017, 05:51:52 PM

May be the problem with Google auto disavow tool.