Not a fan of Spider's :(

[Fi$hy]

http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c57/stupidregistration/Spider.jpg

Someone in the know, explain?

And no, you won't need a degree in insect/arachnid studies to contribute!

 

[SgtFury]

Search Engine isn't it?

 

[Fuzzy Bunny]

I believe search engines use them to search forums.

 

[Pestcontrol]

Yup, search engine spiders are automated programs that basically search the web by just following all links and indexing the pages they get. Which gives them a lot to do on the average forum, and it works pretty well too. I get forum thread results from google all the time.

I just checked, the hello there thread is nowhere to be found on google yet.

 

[Ronin Storm]

I seem to remember Haven commenting that vBulletin's native template isn't well optimised for spidering or keywords.

 

[Pestcontrol]

I searched for a text string, a simple line from duren's initial post in that thread. I search for song lyrics and other things like quotes that way and it works fine with google. I've not checked all of google's results for site:games.thehavennet.org.uk however.

Many forums seem to direct spiders to lightweight or printing templates.

 

[Fuzzy Bunny]

I've searching direct quotes from the BCG forums on Google before and gotten links directly to the thread they were mentioned in. I don't remember fif that was before the new version of vBulletin came out or not though.

 

[Piacular]

Lol, I just tried to search for some of our game names on Google (found loads for Ronin Storm, and I never knew Haven did holidays ). When I did a UK search with mine, the fourth result was the "Google can kiss my ass!" thread .

The crazy spider!

 

[Haven]

Since most of our forums are locked and enabled only on "opt in" we are never going to get much content indexed by google (unless spiders learn to navigate and opt-in *grins*). And yeah the meta-keywords setup in Vbulletin sucks but I'm not going to lose sleep over it as we gain new members by word of mouth more than via search engines

Also unlike a lot of silly websites desperate to have all their content indexed we dont make exceptions for google:

Hacking Webpages and being google
http://tech.thehavennet.org.uk/?q=node/2