Googlebot hitting me HARD

Leader of Men · 10-26-2003, 05:29 AM

Googlebot has been doing some serious hitting on my forum lately. It's great to see what the SE Mod for phpBB can do

Rob · 10-26-2003, 05:43 AM

Hits, visits or uniques?

Nice!

Leader of Men · 10-26-2003, 05:51 AM

Well, I guess it would be 1 unique, over and over again

Wonder if it is spidering my threads... I hope so, because then Nickelback fans will also find things from my threads about the forum.

Rob · 10-26-2003, 05:56 AM

And it will increase your PR.

Leader of Men · 10-26-2003, 05:59 AM

Really? How?

Rob · 10-26-2003, 06:52 AM

"Fact: The maximum amount of PageRank in a site increases as the number of pages in the site increases."

"Bear in mind that the only pages that count are the ones that Google knows about."

Now that Google has found your threads, your page count will probably raise a lot.

I, Brian · 10-26-2003, 08:03 AM

I strongly suspect that Google has the algo fixed to give forums less weight in the PR calculation - so don't hold your breath about the PR increase.

As for the stats - 725 hits=hits not users. If phpbb gives live reporting of the indexing hack then you'll see precisely how they're behaving.

With vBulletin you can see them indexing in real-time - mulitple IPs in different areas at the same time.

If you want to save on your bandwidth during indexing then simply use the robots.txt file to close down the images directories for the bots.

piramida · 10-26-2003, 08:32 AM

how would google know the difference between "forum" and "dynamic website"?

Rob · 10-26-2003, 08:35 AM

The word Forum is in the URL, the title and all over the website. Google gives less or no attention to links on pages with Guestbook in the title, I'm not sure if it does the same for forums.

Mel · 10-26-2003, 08:39 AM

In this case AWstats is reporting visits from spiders, and I suspect that each hit is page request from a spider, which would seem to be supported by the fact the the 725 hits took 28.7 megabytes or about 29 k per hit.

Rob · 10-26-2003, 08:41 AM

It does give you a chance to add links to your main page or other websites at the bottom of the forum, like you see on this forum as well, to increase the site's amount of inbound links.

piramida · 10-26-2003, 08:57 AM

Rob, I find it extremely hard to believe that google would penalise a site for having words 'forum' on it. If that would be true, it will be a small SEO revolution, and surely a big wave of everyone renaming their forums to "chats", "lounges", "rooms" and so on. It just isn't hapenning; it's too easy to workaround and makes little sense since almost any site has some kind of forums and links to forums in menus and "discuss this on our forums" links on pages and whatnot.

Also, everyone knows that forums tend to rank high in google - it makes perfect sense, too, since goog is all about quality of information and where would you find a better information source than on-topic forums?