MyBB Community Forums

Hi,

I am using mybb 1.6.1

My google pages ranking is really low and I would appreciate some advice please.

To try to fix this I installed the Google SEO plugin, but, still no change

So I have now been on Webmaster tools, HTML suggestions.

Everything was ok apart from "Duplicate title tags" I have 235 of them.
I know nothing about this issue and would like to ask a few questions...

Is this normal, 235 duplicates?

Would this keep my page rank low?

How can I fix this?

Could installing google SEO do this? (in a guide I read it said to put a "\" behind the hyphens in the amended .htcacess as in this picture here
However when I did this It showed up errors after installing so I removed them and everything was fine. Does it matter that I have not put backslashes \ as advised?

Could this be a setting within google seo?

I have searched the internet but could find anything useful,
Thanks for reading,
Oliver

my url is www.the-chess-forum.com

Page rank is useless and doesn't help in any way.

(2011-02-04, 07:38 PM)pyridine Wrote: [ -> ]Page rank is useless and doesn't help in any way.

Maybe I wrote this wrong.
I should probably have wrote google position?

When I search for the term "chess forum" on google I am 73rd, I am sure I should be much higher.

(2011-02-04, 06:27 PM)bigoliver Wrote: [ -> ]Does it matter that I have not put backslashes \ as advised?

No, not at all. A \ is not required there. Whether Google SEO tells you to add it or not, depends on your PHP version. PHP has a function that quotes special characters, and at some point, this function started adding \ for - as well because - can have a special meaning in some cases (for example [a-z]).

In general, as long as your URLs work, you don't have to change anything in .htaccess

As for the duplicate title tags, by default all pages of a thread have the same title. You'd need to set a variable with the page number, if it's larger than 1, and include that in your title. The Google SEO plugin unfortunately doesn't do that (yet), so it'd require a code edit (or another plugin).

However, duplicate titles for threads alone, won't be what is causing your issue.

Did you add the Sitemap to webmaster tools? Are your pages getting indexed properly?

EDIT:
Looking at your forum, it only has 200 posts. You need more content.

(2011-02-04, 09:06 PM)frostschutz Wrote: [ -> ]

(2011-02-04, 06:27 PM)bigoliver Wrote: [ -> ]Does it matter that I have not put backslashes \ as advised?

No, not at all. A \ is not required there. Whether Google SEO tells you to add it or not, depends on your PHP version. PHP has a function that quotes special characters, and at some point, this function started adding \ for - as well because - can have a special meaning in some cases (for example [a-z]).

In general, as long as your URLs work, you don't have to change anything in .htaccess

As for the duplicate title tags, by default all pages of a thread have the same title. You'd need to set a variable with the page number, if it's larger than 1, and include that in your title. The Google SEO plugin unfortunately doesn't do that (yet), so it'd require a code edit (or another plugin).

However, duplicate titles for threads alone, won't be what is causing your issue.

Did you add the Sitemap to webmaster tools? Are your pages getting indexed properly?

EDIT:
Looking at your forum, it only has 200 posts. You need more content.

Hi frostschutz,

Firstly, congratulation on your excellent plugin, your clearly the right guy to speak to about my issues

Thank you for your reply, I had been worrying about them backslashes lol, you put my mind to rest.

Quote:You'd need to set a variable with the page number, if it's larger than 1, and include that in your title.

Tomorrow I will look into this, see what I can find and hopefully get it sorted.

Quote:Looking at your forum, it only has 200 posts. You need more content.

Yeah I do need more content, just I have noticed that when I search for any content in my forums google does not find it, it finds my site but not any of the content.
Somehow I was #3 for chess forums on google for a short while, but, this is a new site so I guess it can go up and down quickly?!

I have not submitted a site map to webmaster as I did not know it was needed, I thought your plugin gave the map to the googlebot, I have no idea where I got that from, I should read the instructions more carefully.
I have had a quick look and it asks to to complete the url to the site map...
http://the-chess-forum.com/ (my input here)

This is such a noob question I feel embarrassed asking, but, where will my site map be, I am sure I will work it out tomorrow (its late here), but if its an easy answer it could save me some time tomorrow.

Also, if my site map is constantly changing do I need to resubmit it? Or will it auto update?

Thanks for all your help, you are the seo king

Oliver
www.the-chess-forum.com

(2011-02-04, 09:46 PM)bigoliver Wrote: [ -> ]I thought your plugin gave the map to the googlebot

If you use the example robots.txt that comes with the plugin, it contains the sitemap reference, so Google will pick it up by itself, yes. Even so it's still better to add it in Webmaster Tools directly as only then you'll have access to the sitemap statistics.

Quote:where will my site map be

By default it's called sitemap-index.xml

Quote:Also, if my site map is constantly changing do I need to resubmit it? Or will it auto update?

Google will revisit the sitemap by itself. You only need to resubmit it if you changed something major or if the sitemap moved to anyother location.