MIMF and search engines

[Steve Senseney]

I remember Deb mentioning that the old MIMF could not be searched by the routine search engines.

Is the current software and board being searched?

Has any one placed a test word or picture and checked to see if it is being searched?

When the the archives are brought over, will they be available to the search engines?

[Charlie Schultz]

Yes, I believe it is being searched though I have not specifically tested it. The forum software has like 35 bots listed, we've been scanned by 8 total since we started. As of this time today, we've been scanned by a couple Google bots, an msn bot and ichiro.

I'm not sure about the archives, I'm guessing yes (and I mean guessing).

[Bryan Bear]

I just copied and pasted the last sentence of the OP into Google with quotation marks, and got no results. I'm not sure what that means exactly. I for one, hope it is readily searchable. I often google questions and find discussion threads on other fora. This has fixed my furnace, helped me figure out the best way to rework some plumbing and many other things. It is a great way for people to get answers (from people who have experience rather than people who are guessing on yahoo answers). IT will also help new members to find us/the hobby.

[Jim McConkey]

Most forums are NOT indexed, because the pages are all dynamically created from a big database by the forum software, so there is no permanent URL to index. I think there are some tricks to at least partially get around that, but I do not know them. The Library, on the other hand, is a huge collection of static HTML files, so it COULD be indexed by the major search engines. Library access has always been a perq of membership, though, and we may not want it publicly indexed.

[Charlie Schultz]

This from the phpBB manual:

phpBB 3 introduced a new system for managing search indexer and bot accounts. It allows you to identify these automated bots by their IP or a part of their user-agent, which is a setting that normally identifies the browser of a user. After you add a bot and it is recognized, phpBB does not treat the session as anonymous, but uses the created bot account. Bots use permissions set by the predefined Bots group. Identifying bots is important so that phpBB can serve them content which is more appropriate for search engines - dead links to pages without content are omitted, e.g. posting pages, report post pages etc. Bots never receive a session ID in the URL, which should not appear in the search results.

If you google phpbb mimf you'll get a couple hits for our forum.

[Deb Suran]

At this very moment, "Google Feedfetcher" is listed as a registered user online here.