Google not indexing all my forum

[firsttime]

Good morning ladies and gents. Just had a quick question that I was hoping to tap your creative minds.

I have a forum with about 500 threads. The forum is 6 months old. Google only seems to have indexed about 120 of the 500 topics. Is there any way I can get it to index more?

Many thanks for any replies.

 

[glengara]

If the forum structure isn't a problem it's probably down to insufficient links/PR to warrant a deeper crawl, try "vBulletin SEO" (or whatever your forum type is) in Google and see what comes up.

 

[firsttime]

Thanks Glengara, that makes sense.

 

[firsttime]

Can anyone reccomend how I should produce a sitemap for google?

Thanks

 

[Geoff]

This is a free tool that I have used in the past. Seems to work ok and a good place to start:

Create your Google Sitemap Online - XML Sitemaps

You can also get scripts that you can run nightly etc that would update your file dynamically.

 

[mneylon]

If you're using Vbulletin there's a plugin that can do it for you

And I can't recommend VBSEO highly enough!

 

[firsttime]

Thanks guys, I'll look into that. I am running phpbb by the way.

 

[johnmryan]

Is vbulletin SEO really worth 149 USD - seems a little expensive, any info on this from users of it?

 

[louie]

that's what blacknight said:

And I can't recommend VBSEO highly enough!

 

[Cormac]

Is vbulletin SEO really worth 149 USD - seems a little expensive, any info on this from users of it?

I don't think it's worth it. There are plenty of free plugins available to SEO your site. VBSEO sitemaps is a free tool. There is a free rewrite plugin. Meta hacks. Page Title hacks.

Do a search for SEO on vbulletin.org and check out the many threads on vbulletin seo on this forum. There is more than enough info freely available on how to seo your site without spending your subscription money for VBSEO.

VBSEO is merely a rewrite plugin. It offers nothing else. It has a Zend optimiser which you can install freely. It comes with Sitemaps (free). A sig link extension (free)....

 

[mneylon]

VBSEO is merely a rewrite plugin. It offers nothing else.

That's simply not true.

Looking at the menu options alone:
Rewrite settings - you can choose from a wealth of options
Linkbacks - full support for pings and trackbacks
Custom rewrites
Custom redirects
Meta tag control
Stopwords
Acronym expansion eg. you could use this to convert "seo" => "search engine optimisation"
Nofollows - control which links are followed and which ones aren't
HTML cleanup - compresses the HTML output
Social bookmarking
Rewrite links in emails
Google Analytics integration
Adsense section targetting

and a lot lot more

 

[firsttime]

ta for that

 

[firsttime]

Thanks for the useful replies everyone!

 

[Cormac]

That's simply not true.

Looking at the menu options alone:
Rewrite settings - you can choose from a wealth of options
Linkbacks - full support for pings and trackbacks
Custom rewrites
Custom redirects
Meta tag control
Stopwords
Acronym expansion eg. you could use this to convert "seo" => "search engine optimisation"
Nofollows - control which links are followed and which ones aren't
HTML cleanup - compresses the HTML output
Social bookmarking
Rewrite links in emails
Google Analytics integration
Adsense section targetting

and a lot lot more

The majority of those features are offered for free elsewhere and some of them are not all that useful either.
There is very little point in compressing the html output if you aren't using external css files too. It's a bit counter productive.

 

[mneylon]

The majority of those features are offered for free elsewhere

And how much time and effort would it take to implement them all and maintain them across version of Vbulletin?

It's obvious you don't see the value in VBSeo, whereas I do.