Improving search engine spider / bot visibility

[artfreaks]

I have been monitoring referals to my website for some months now and it seems that the only search engine derived traffic I am getting is to either my HTML pages or my Coppermine gallery.

I have not detected one single hit to anything on either of my two licenced Invision Forums / Gallery / Blogs installations.

My Art Forums have had quite a lot of content, for some time already - so I would have expected at least the odd hit from search engine derived traffic by now?

In an effort to sort out the reason for this, I had a look at my ACP / Tools and Settings / Search Engine Spiders

On the setting for "Force spider/bot to use skin" it says: "This is useful as you can create a 'lite' optimized skin for your spiders to use to reduce bandwidth and increase the depth of the bot crawling."

I clicked on the drop-down menu, hoping that I would be able to select the "Lo-Fi Version" of the board. Unfortunately, the only options available are the installed skins - you can't select the Lo-Fi version of the board.

Would it be possible, and would it even help search engine friendliness, if the Lo-Fi version of the board could be selected on that drop-down menu?

Is there anything else that you could do to in order to make Invision Powerboard more search engine friendly?

By all means, check out my site. It is at:

artfreaks.com

There are actually two complete Invision Forums / Gallery / Blogs installations on the site - but one of them is hidden. The hidden Forums / Gallery and Blogs basically get traffic, either from referrals from my Coppermine Gallery - or by direct advertising, which is getting expensive...

[=Charles]

From checking the Google cache of the links below, it looks like you've only recently migrated to IPB from phpBB.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=s...ums&btnG=Search

[artfreaks]

Ah, ok... It's been a couple of months already since I switched to Invision and, on a number of occasions, I have seen that Google bot crawling around on my forums? I'll give it another month or two and see how the site stats look...

Regarding being able to force search engine spiders to use the Lo-Fi Version... Would that be an option you could include in the drop-down menu and would it make a lot of difference?

Thanks for your time!

[bfarber]

It's a bit trickier to do that, and I'm not sure it would help optimization. I'm no SEO expert, however, to do that you'd actually need to redirect the spider. The Lo-Fi isn't exactly a skin - it's a stripped down access method to the forums in a different directory.

Thus, to force the spiders to access only Lo-Fi pages, you'd need to redirect them when they hit the main forums. I'm not sure that would be the best thing (they would likely not index your site at all, only the Lo-Fi content).

In my experience, bots have no trouble accessing the Lo-Fi content, and do actually prefer it, however I would leave that up to the bot itself to reach. On the other hand, you *can* install a new skin in the ACP, strip out unnecessary graphics, so on, and so forth, and force bots to use THAT skin.

I'm leaving the suggestion of the Lo-Fi page forced skin open, but I don't see it as being beneficial myself. Others are free to chime in and prove me wrong. :)

[ellawella]

I'm not absolutely sure, but if you only wanted bots to look at the lofi version, you could try putting a robots.txt in the root of your public_html directory with the text:

Allow: /forum/lofiversion

Disallow: /forum/index.php

The full version of your board index would still be spidered, however, unless you somehow 301'd /forum/ to /forum/index.php.