DevShed Archives

Today I was searching around for some stuff at google.com and along came a spider, errrm no I mean along came a result with a DevShed link, so as DevShed is my main haunt I decided to go and take a look. And it took me here:

http://forums.devshed.com/archive/15/2002/10/4/46112

At first I noticed that the vB PHP & URL Tags were not being parsed which was fine, then I noticed that the signatures of the people were not included.

Now I have never been in the archive before, never had a need to as I generally use the forum search, but I was surprised at the above.

Randy, Zues, isn't it possible to include our signatures in the archives and parse the URL Tags, I realise that the PHP tags might be a bit more difficult but the others should be fairly easy to do without having any side affect on your rankings.

There are two reasons for my asking:

A) Give us some credit for our time here, most of us include our names etc in our sigs.

B) Most people are aware that engines such as google rank your sites by the number of links linking to it, again most of us include links to our sites in our sigs.

There is an old saying I remember from an old job I had, can't remember exactly where it came from but it went along the lines of:

'Help us to help you'

We all spend our time either asking or answering questions which has helped you out by making the site popular, anychance you can help us out with our sites now?

Also what do the rest of you think, am I being to finicky here?

You are being finicky like my old lady... j/k

Yes - I agree, and it seems like any time you do a search on google now pertaining to anything php'ish and javascript'ish the arhives are shown in the top 5 results....

But yes, I agree with your post...

That is an interesting discovery Silky.

I totally agree with your point of having our website link in our cigs and how it can affect our Google ranking.

Joel (joelonsoftware.com) had mentioned his Product name FogBugz (Bug tracking software) in all his archives. Now whenever you search for bug trackng software, FogBugz is now included in the first page (Earlier it was never to be seen!) [ http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...acking+software ]

I hope Randy/Zeus will take some action on this!

Regards,
JD

Does this forum run any browser detection at all? Why is Google indexing the text only version of the pages?

I'll see if we can do that. The archives are "down and dirty," copies of most of the content, really meant to be seen by the search engines. Your point about having links (from your signatures) to your own sites is a good one.

Randy

Thanks Randy

How is this one coming along Randy, is it possible?

Lucas has been out of town. We'll try to get to it soon.

thanks,

Randy

coughs / bump / reminder

Any news Randy?