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Changes at YachtForums...

Discussion in 'General Yachting Discussion' started by YachtForums, Aug 24, 2015.

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  1. K1W1

    K1W1 Senior Member

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    Wouldn't it simply be quicker and more efficient to delete those that cause these false ratings and concentrate on quality not quantity?
  2. YachtForums

    YachtForums Administrator

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    They still represent inbound links, but it's crossed my mind to remove less relevant discussions from years ago. The part that absolutely KILLS me is Google is ranking some yachting websites better than YF for the wrong reasons. For example...

    AIM bought a certain superyacht domain that really doesn't have good content. YF always outranked it in a search for builders. Because AIM's holding include Show Management and a suite of marine magazines and websites, this gave weight to the new domain. Still, this domain can't hold a candle to YOUR discussions or the reviews we've written.

    Another website has published features that are nothing more than the same verbiage with different specifications. They get pics from the yard, post it up with generic garble and people come just to see the pics. It's a good place for designers and decorators to study trends, or magazine editors to get the latest news, but I don't know any people in those professions that can afford a yacht.

    Google needs to re-evaluate their definition "rich content", because these sites have very thin content. The whole thing has become a popularity contest.
  3. Chasm

    Chasm Senior Member

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  4. YachtForums

    YachtForums Administrator

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    That may be part of the problem, but I've been studying videos from Google's SEO expert Matt Cutts and duplicate forum content doesn't carry as harsh a penalty as thin or copied content. Sadly, there's a broker website topping lots of keywords by re-publishing reviews written by magazines. It is NOT their content and Google should be de-ranking that site. They re-published several of our reviews until I caught them and threatened legal action.
  5. YachtForums

    YachtForums Administrator

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    To update this thread...

    As of this morning, we've finished canonical redirects to over 2200 news pieces. This has taken about 6 weeks, including weekends. It's been tedious and time consuming, but it's paying off. Google crawled YF early last week and the number of duplicates title tags and meta descriptions were reduced by 70%. On the next crawl - sometime in the upcoming week - we should see most of the duplicates disappear. It will take some time, but our rankings on target keywords should bump up

    You may also note about a dozen new builder forums have been added for better indexing of news, discussions, etc. They are also included in the new display pages located in the builders list on the front page of YF. We created these pages for readers to have easy access to the latest news, reviews and features on the builder they are researching or following. Clicking on any of the display articles takes the reader directly into that particular builder's forum for expanded information.
  6. YachtForums

    YachtForums Administrator

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  7. brian eiland

    brian eiland Senior Member

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    Something I think I notice quiet different from your old software verse the newer one,....you use to be able to 'title' a particular posting within a single subject thread ? That option is not offered now?? You can still do that on Boatdesign forums. And you can do it on Cruisers & Sailing Forums, but many people don't realize it, and they end up just repeating the same 'title' for every posting within the same subject thread,....that is annoying.

    Does this capability to individually title one's posting on an existing subject thread affect you Google rating at all??
  8. YachtForums

    YachtForums Administrator

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    Hi Brian,

    Thread titles in each post are redundant. If you look at the latest versions of vBulletin, they have been removed. Both of the sites you mentioned are using OLD versions of vBulletin; 3.8 and lower, mostly because of the vulnerabilities with the later releases of the software. These vulnerabilities are the reason we switched to XenForo and while it's been a difficult transition from the back end, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. With regards to thread titles in each individual post, it can only harm SE ranking because its very probable that bots will interpret these titles as duplicates which carries a certain penalty due the latest release of Google's search engine algorithm.
  9. olderboater

    olderboater Senior Member

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    Having titles for each post encourages switching topics in threads too. You look at some of those other sites and see how much more prevalent that is.