Forum posts not showing up in search engines like Google

#1 · January 7, 2019, 1:59 am

My site is crawled frequently by Google and very recent content does show up for Google searches, but when I search for content that would be specific to my forum, I’m not getting any links for it.

I’m sure I probably have a setting wrong somewhere. Could someone help me figure this out please?

My site is here: http://www.eastcarolinaroots.com

The forum url is: http://www.eastcarolinaroots.com/forum/

#2 · January 7, 2019, 11:19 am

Hello @sara

You defined in your forum-settings that topics should be only viewable for logged-in users. Thats the reason why search-engines cannot “see” your topics as well.

Please disable the option “Hide posts from logged-out users” in Forum -> Settings -> General and search-engines will be able to index your forum-topics.

If you want to support the development of Asgaros Forum, you can leave a good review or donate. Thank you very much!

#3 · January 7, 2019, 5:17 pm

Ah! Excellent! Thank you so much!

Asgaros has reacted to this post.

#4 · January 13, 2019, 7:30 am

Ok… I made the change you suggested earlier in the week, and while Google Analytics shows the different forum topics in my content view, my sitemap and site breadcrumbs still aren’t “seeing” the forum posts. Also, Google still isn’t indexing them even though they’re indexing other content on my site.

I do see that the forum has its own breadcrumbs, but my site is still treating it as though all visits to the forum are just to the main forum page. I’m sure this is probably another setting I have wrong somewhere.

I do have the Yoast SEO plugin and I’ve looked for any category or setting that might be applicable to the Asgaros Forum, but I’m not seeing anything.

Thanks in advance for your help!

#5 · January 13, 2019, 4:10 pm

Hello @sara

Please disable Yoast SEO for the page which contains the [forum]-shortcode. Asgaros Forum already automatically applies all relevant meta-information to the page-header. Yoast SEO on the other side applies its own custom-rules for SEO and overwrites the rules made by Asgaros Forum – thats why search-engines cant detect the topics correctly.

There should be a setting in Yoast SEO which allows you to disable their SEO-logic for certain pages.

If you want to support the development of Asgaros Forum, you can leave a good review or donate. Thank you very much!

#6 · January 13, 2019, 6:34 pm

Ok! Yes! That worked! Google is already indexing my forum now. Thank you so much!

Asgaros has reacted to this post.

#7 · January 13, 2019, 6:36 pm

And apparently this is something that has to be done in functions.php.

This is the solution that worked for me https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37845968/disable-wordpress-yoast-seo-on-single-page

Asgaros has reacted to this post.

#8 · January 13, 2019, 7:37 pm

I am happy to hear that its working now! 🙂

If you want to support the development of Asgaros Forum, you can leave a good review or donate. Thank you very much!

#9 · January 16, 2019, 9:40 pm

Ok… Something strange is going on. 😬 I don’t know if it would have anything to do with the latest forum update, but now it’s as though Google isn’t crawling my forum results in the search engine anymore. I have deactivated Yoast SEO altogether and I’m not using any sort of SEO plugin… wondering if that might help. (I also commented out the code referenced above that I had inserted in my functions.php.

Also, I’ve noticed internally that Jetpack’s Site Stats only ever show that people are hitting /forum, not the individual posts, even though I know they are. Of course it’s been that way since I installed it.

Any ideas on what might be going on?

#10 · January 16, 2019, 9:59 pm

Hello @sara

Have you installed additional plugins in the meantime?

As I see, again a wrong canonical-url is generated inside your html-header-area for individual topics:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.eastcarolinaroots.com/forum/" />

The same holds for the open-graph tags generated by JetPack:

<!-- Jetpack Open Graph Tags -->
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.eastcarolinaroots.com/forum/" />

As mentioned before Asgaros Forum already creates the required and correct tags for this. If other plugins do the same then I have no control about it as a plugin-author because browsers and search-engines pick the first ones. Sadly WordPress also does not require an API for this kind of stuff, thats why there are always this kind of problems in combination with other plugins.

Please check again your other plugins and try to disable the generation of canonical-urls or open-graph tags – at least for the forum-page.

If you want to support the development of Asgaros Forum, you can leave a good review or donate. Thank you very much!