Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

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Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
I've just realized that Google isn't finding the content within my forum.  It seems to have found the names of folders and some of the high level stuff, but not the words within the posts.

I've checked and the page on my website the forum is on is Public, meaning not hidden.  And that page is being found by Google's bots.

I've read what I've found here in Support about Google searches, and the vast majority of that is to make it so that Google can't find them, which is the opposite of what I want.  I did find this topic that discusses it, and the very last post explains how to ensure that it isn't hidden.  Anne wrote "As Admin and from the outermost layer of Nabble, select: Options > Application > Change Appearance > And scroll down to 'Extra Features'."  But I can't seem to find what she is talking about.

So, what am I doing wrong?  I really need to get the forum visible to the world via external searches.  Thanks!
I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

haozwang<Nabble>
the menu has changed. go to Options->Application->Extras and Add-ons. in the content section make sure the "hide content from search engine" checkbox isn't checked.
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
Thanks, Peter.  Unfortunately it wasn't checked, as shown below.  So, what am I doing wrong?


I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

GregChapman
In reply to this post by Gary Lewis
Hi Gary,
Gary Lewis wrote
 Anne wrote "As Admin and from the outermost layer of Nabble, select: Options > Application > Change Appearance > And scroll down to 'Extra Features'."  But I can't seem to find what she is talking about.
I think Anne made a typo in that post. I believe she was referring to:

Options > Application > Extra & Add-ons > Content > Hide contents from search engines.

but that option is NOT checked by default and I suspect you have already found it and confirmed that the check box is clear.

I do not claim to be an SEO expert with current knowledge and search engines constantly vary their algorithms in order to defeat those who manage to take unfair advantage of the current algorithms.

However, one thing I am sure about is the importance of good <title> tags. Just try any search and the top results always include pages that include your search terms within the page title and within the page URL. In the Nabble context you can't do too much about the URL, but you can set the title tags for pages via:

Options > Application > Change title and meta tags

I would set about editing the default tags on as many pages as you can.

But you may still need to wait a few weeks for search engines to return to  of your site and spider more of it.

Of course, it depends on the nature of your forum but, if appropriate, I'd always try and mention, or quote from, as much of the important content on the forum on your main site. Content that is held within <iframe> tags is never going to be considered as important as your site's own content. On your own site you also have much more control over the factors that make your own site appear more worthy to search engines.
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

haozwang<Nabble>
GregChapman wrote
... Content that is held within <iframe> tags is never going to be considered as important as your site's own content. ..
that is a good point there. Embedding is the devil
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
In reply to this post by GregChapman
Greg - Thanks.  I'm no SEO expert either, but I have been reading up on it in the book I bought.  And I have much of the rest of the website's pages showing up fairly well in the searches.

But, in the case of the content of the forum, Google searches show up nothing, regardless of how long it has been there.  Here's an example from Aug 5th, one of the early posts on the forum.  As you can I've highlighted the phrase "My intent is for this to be a cost-free and an ad-free forum." and I copied that to the clipboard.




Then I pasted that to the Google search, told it verbatim, and got no hits.  None.  Nada.  But, I have a site map that includes the page that the forum is on - the home page.  And I see that my crawl stat's show that every page has been crawled many times.  In fact, I've resubmitted it several times.  Plus, the few crawl errors I have are not on the forum page.  In any event, I've asked Google to fetch/crawl/index it again.

So, I'm at a loss as to how to get it found, which is important as people are wanting to offer things for sale, but if they can't be found......

I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

haozwang<Nabble>
Let me inquire Franklin as he has done SEO
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
Thanks!  If it was the embedding issue then there would be results of some kind - either on my site or on Nabble's servers.  But I can't find anything from my forum except the names of folder/topics and header info.  Nothing from any of the posts.
I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
In reply to this post by haozwang<Nabble>
Any news on this?  Still can't find anything on my forum from the outside, regardless of how old the posts are.  In contrast it is easy to find things on other forums.  
I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

haozwang<Nabble>
Franklin is working on finding the source of the issue
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
Thanks!
I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
Well, I think I've implemented the changes correctly and things are working well on my forum - except that Google still cannot find things on the forum, although it does on the rest of the site.  Below is a screen capture of a search that I just did for a sentence from this post on Sept 8th, 2017.  I've instructed Google to crawl my site, and especially the forum page, several times since then.  And the average page-crawl is 105/per day, so it should have hit every page many times since I only have ~400 pages.

Help!  Do I need some reference to the Nabble server?

I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

haozwang<Nabble>
I'll get franklin's attention on this
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
Thanks.  It is possible that it is something that I did or didn't do.  So I'm quite willing to help in any way I can.
I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
I've been poking around trying to see something amiss in the Google crawl stats and found this.  I don't know if it is significant or not, but just in case....


I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

GregChapman
This post was updated on .
As you probably know, the way search engines are told that they shouldn't crawl a site is through a robots.txt file.

 You've previously shown that you have asked Nabble not to install one with the appropriate code to say "don't go here". So it looks as if we need to know where that file is and what it says.

I'm not an expert on robots.txt rules and I'm certainly not clear why a rule that blocks .js or .css files would make your site invisible, but having a robots.txt file installed at all is a surprise to me if you want your site to be fully crawled.
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
Greg!  Good find!  I wasn't aware of what robots.txt files do, but that makes sense.

Here's a grab of the page from the Weebly editor, and there's nothing there but the header, pic, and embedded code.




And here's what Google Search Console says:



And I don't see anything in the header and footer code.  So, how do I find it?
I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

GregChapman
Gary Lewis wrote
And I don't see anything in the header and footer code.  So, how do I find it?
It won't be there. It's a separate file that you will find in the root folder alongside your home page file. I'm not a user of Weebly, Wix or other online web editors. You'll probably need to hunt down some settings somewhere in the "control panel" for your site that will control what it contains - or if it exists at all - but it seems clear that it does!

I use a conventional hosting service where I create my pages locally and then use an FTP program to upload them to the space on the server that's been allocated to me as part of the hosting package.

For me it's just a matter of creating a robots.txt locally and then uploading it to the root folder where my site is hosted. There's a general introduction to the subject here:
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

Gary Lewis
Greg - Thanks.  I've checked all of the options I can find in the Weebly editor, particularly in the SEO section, and cannot find it.  So I submitted a question to Weebly for help on this.

How's the weather there?  It is 80F here in Nicaragua.  
I'm not Nabble support, but have Nabble running on my Weebly website: http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/
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Re: Google Doesn't Find My Forum's Content

GregChapman
Hi Gary,

Let's hope that Weebly can track it down.

Last year at this time, I was in St Lucia with temperatures round about what you have.
This year I'm at home under leaden grey skies and 7°C, having risen from 1°C when I awoke!

I discovered recently that Nabble will translate HTML entities nicely. Those temperatures were written like this:
7&deg;C, having risen from 1&deg;C when I awoke

Incidentally, it could be another way to add bullets, although it doesn't give you the indents normally, required!
• Bullet
Written as:
&bull; Bullet


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