In reply to Dolphin 7.1 (Osho) - Forums (UPDATED)
Andrew Boon
Andrew Boon•17th of July 2012•to houstonlively
 
Well, I think I've explained it twice now. As you said: " I constantly get Google search results, follow the link, only to find out that the terms I searched for don't exist on the page I landed on" - THIS happens because of vBulletin-like pagination system, due to reshuffling and/or "optimised" all-in-one version serving during indexing.

Just because it's vBulletin doesn't mean they're right. They have to support existing structure now matter what and to do that they have see more to code a MASSIVE platform to serve a simple purpose.
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houstonlively
houstonlively•17th of July 2012•to Andrew Boon
 
Give me one example of the problem you describe, because I'm not sure I have ever encountered it on a VB site. You should be able to come up with an example on vbulletin.com
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houstonlively
houstonlively•17th of July 2012•to Andrew Boon
 
Better yet, let's see an example from this VB forum: http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/

For most VB or IPB forums, each page shows 10 posts. Over 10 posts, and readability suffers. With your auto split method, a 100 post thread will be split into 10 different topics?? This makes sense to you? I don't know anyone in the entire forum world that does this. Over time, the thread fragments will get chronologically spread out all over the place. This just doesn't feel natural. I can't believe the see more folks around here are just eating this up like it's a good thing. It isn't, and you will all find out the hard way.
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Andrew Boon
Andrew Boon•17th of July 2012•to houstonlively
 
Let's take this one: http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/49540-1000-post-club-51.html

I've searched for "TEIN and Hoopy" - a unique query which is originally resided on page 51. What would happen if moderators delete a few posts, or, say a member with all their posts? The "TEIN and Hoopy" words would move to page 50.. Google wouldn't update it's index for page 51 and 50 often because it's not clued that those page are refreshed, since they'd be only accessible from pages 40-60 see more of an old thread. Fellow searches ends up on the page that doesn't have the words anymore, despite Google thinking other wise. I don't have an offhand real example, but I DO encounter them often and they are frustrating.

Also look at this page - http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/the-lounge/

Once a new post is added to a topic, the topic is pushed up looking like this:

[1000 Post Club ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page)]

Google is presented with a 6 OLD PAGES and only one updated page with crappy anchor test "Last Page". Instead Google could have been fed with a refreshed page with great anchor text. Bad SEO.

The forum you suggested as an example is clear case of something overwhelmed with massive amount of links pushed to the top, which doesn't improve usability much.

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The way your forum works may also lead to "imputing" a different use patterns. Forums at http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/ have a bunch of super-long thread, which, per se, is NOT a good thing and the structure practically encourages their further growth. So, you get the situation when same questions/answers are posted within same Topic only because people don't' bother to go through hundreds of pages anyway. AutoSplit MAY (I don't know for sure, yet) indadvertedly force people to keep topics/discussions more succinct.

Again, I don't imply that Auto-Split is better in every respect. I am suggesting that going by that "Occam's Razor" principle and considering the burden of development, implementation, support, etc, etc the simple solution is preferable.

I can already see how we could improve AutoSplit and make it close the gaps where it's inferior to paginate, but those add ons still feel a lot more simple and intuitive than the original paginate.

We used to have no paginate or auto-split, and yet forums DID work, even if only for us here at BoonEx Unity. Auto-Split is one good step to improve them. Let's see how it goes.
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houstonlively
houstonlively•17th of July 2012•to Andrew Boon
 
OK... let's take that same example and do it your way. We'd end up with

49540-1000-post-club-part1
49540-1000-post-club-part2
49540-1000-post-club-part3
49540-1000-post-club-part4
...... everything in between
49540-1000-post-club-part204

(your way will need the thread ID in the url so you know where all the parts belong)

Now you have 204 parts with very similar names, as opposed to 204 different pages with their own unique url. Why would Google treat this any better than standard see more pagination? The only difference is that one is a dynamic url, and the other is a static url. Does Google really preference to static urls? How would Google know the difference?

I really don't see how your way will improve Google indexing. I do see how, in large forums, your way will create a spaghetti bowl of threads with similar names.

Congratulations! You have invented forum navigation from hell.
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Andrew Boon
Andrew Boon•18th of July 2012•to houstonlively
 
URLs would be pretty much the same, static or dynamic doesn't really matter. Difference is in "anchor text" at the moment of indexing and in supplying the freshest page right from the Forums homepage.

We didn't invent this method. On many well-managed forums moderators would split long topics, knowing that too many pages is a recipe for troubles. (example - webmasterworld.com - they do have paginate, but they alway split after 5-10 pages. they also use 30 posts per page, not 10).

So, see more yeah, in our case we'd end up with 49540-1000-post-club-part204 but the 49540-1000-post-club-part1 would stay far behind, and Google wouldn't have to reindex it every time it visits your forum homepage.

Basically I am implying that our setup works better from MODERN search engines, that generally prefer more dynamic content with unique updates.
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houstonlively
houstonlively•18th of July 2012•to Andrew Boon
 
Do you not see how cluttered this will make forums? Maybe the search engines will love it, but regular forum users (humans) will have to wade through a sea of threads. It's just plain nuts.

Can you at least try to think of a way to just display only the parent thread for human users, that loads the individual pages, and let the google bots gorge themselves on the countless component parts? Say when a Google user clicks on a search result called 123-Some-Topic-Part-10.php, when the user gets see more to your site, they will load 123-Some-Topic.php with Part-10 dynamically loaded into it. Is this remotely possible?
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RobertRun
RobertRun•23rd of July 2012•to Andrew Boon
 
That makes, especially now since almost all search engines have gone dynamic..
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geek_girl
geek_girl•9th of February 2013•to houstonlively
 
"Congratulations! You have invented forum navigation from hell."
Exactly!
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geek_girl
geek_girl•9th of February 2013•to Andrew Boon
 
Forums are not about searching; forums are about the users on the site; not what is sitting in Google's database.
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geek_girl
geek_girl•9th of February 2013•to houstonlively
 
HoustonLively is dead on the mark with this. Autopilot, even if it was your idea Andrew, is not a good idea.
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houstonlively
houstonlively•9th of February 2013•to geek_girl
 
I don't think Andrew wants to talk about this anymore. Another thing that sucks big time, is that you can't quote posts or reply on any part but the most recent autopilot generated topic. If you land on any search result that isn't the last part, people will wonder why they can't do those things, and they won't know to go madly clicking on the next part links to get to the last one, so that they can post something. At first, I though this all was a really bad idea, but now I know it's even worse see more than that.
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geek_girl
geek_girl•9th of February 2013•to Andrew Boon
 
Being index in a search engine might be a good thing. However, the top priority here is not to be in some search database but to have a solid easy to use forum for your users, not for Google. Autopilot does not provide that for the users.
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