Microsoft Damned, AtW Praised

[administrator]

Nothing special done to try and get us higher in Google. It is not a wholly standard VBulletin install though, we do use a trick or two to make it more spider friendly.

[Durbs]

Nothing special done to try and get us higher in Google. It is not a wholly standard VBulletin install though, we do use a trick or two to make it more spider friendly.

Pray tell of these tricks...

[Sysman]

Mind you, I think the CUK forum has a high ranking with search engines for one reason or another, and that may explain why they throw multiple bots at it.

I think Google likes sites with lots of new posts, especially when they contain plenty of URLs pointing elsewhere.

One thing I could never understand about Google though - why on earth did it find the Apache manuals so exciting when I had them on my own home server? It was in there all the frigging time.

[NickFitz]

Google have put an enormous amount of effort into speeding up their indexing over the last few years - the post Google Indexing Many Web Pages in Real-Time at the (completely unofficial) Google Operating System blog shows the index being updated within eleven minutes, and that's from July 2007.

A more recent post from Pandia, Real time indexing in Google, makes the point that the Googlebot is prioritising sites on the basis of relevance and frequency of updates: if a site has content that causes it to rank highly (for whatever) and is frequently updated, then the bot will come by as often as every few minutes.

So Google's algorithms have decided that the CUK forums have some relevance to something, and are updated with sufficient frequency to make them worth checking almost constantly.

Two obvious points arise from this observation. Firstly, the Googlebot is behaving in a manner eerily similar to some of the compulsive posters here. Secondly, it proves beyond doubt that Google relies solely on its algorithms when deciding what to index and how often; if there were any human beings involved, they would have had to have realised by now that the vast majority of posts here are utter drivel

[Bunk]

Pray tell of these tricks...

I think there's an SEO friendly URLs addon of some description, so that you get the thread title in the URL, instead something like ?topic=51259.

[Churchill]

Google have put an enormous amount of effort into speeding up their indexing over the last few years - the post Google Indexing Many Web Pages in Real-Time at the (completely unofficial) Google Operating System blog shows the index being updated within eleven minutes, and that's from July 2007.

A more recent post from Pandia, Real time indexing in Google, makes the point that the Googlebot is prioritising sites on the basis of relevance and frequency of updates: if a site has content that causes it to rank highly (for whatever) and is frequently updated, then the bot will come by as often as every few minutes.

So Google's algorithms have decided that the CUK forums have some relevance to something, and are updated with sufficient frequency to make them worth checking almost constantly.

Two obvious points arise from this observation. Firstly, the Googlebot is behaving in a manner eerily similar to some of the compulsive posters here. Secondly, it proves beyond doubt that Google relies solely on its algorithms when deciding what to index and how often; if there were any human beings involved, they would have had to have realised by now that the vast majority of posts here are utter drivel

Point in fact!

[Bunk]

So Google's algorithms have decided that the CUK forums have some relevance to something

[Sysman]

Two obvious points arise from this observation. Firstly, the Googlebot is behaving in a manner eerily similar to some of the compulsive posters here. Secondly, it proves beyond doubt that Google relies solely on its algorithms when deciding what to index and how often; if there were any human beings involved, they would have had to have realised by now that the vast majority of posts here are utter drivel

I can see the headline now.

Shock! Horror!
Google Prefers Drivel!

[NickFitz]

I can see the headline now.

Shock! Horror!
Google Prefers Drivel!

It appears that we are on something like a twenty minute refresh cycle at the moment, as my ten-minute search returned no results. EDIT: No, looks like twenty, not fifteen.

However the Daily Fail seems to be getting indexed as frequently as every five minutes

[VectraMan]

I think there's an SEO friendly URLs addon of some description, so that you get the thread title in the URL, instead something like ?topic=51259.

And with no php? or asp? but looks like a link to a static HTML page:

http://forums.contractoruk.com/gener...praised-2.html

I guess a static HTML page that's often updated must rate higher than any kind of script generated content.