Member Avatar for hybr!d

Hi Dani,

Glad to see you managed to get your site fixed after a Panda hit!

I too own a modest forum and it also has been hit.

I have see your video interview and read your posts here and there and have been implementing similar changes to avoid Google finding/indexing thin content.

One of the things you did that interested me was noindexing 0 reply threads... as far as i can tell you run a heavily customized version of vbulletin but for the life of me i cannot work out how to add the tag to just these pages, if conditionals dont seem to play ball.

Would you be so kind as to reveal how you did it, you could be saving another business from ruin after 6 years hard work.

Yours hopefully,
Dave Page

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Member Avatar for Dani

Hi Dave,

I'm not sure what version of vBulletin you are running, but with the 3.x line, you can do this with template conditionals.

Add the following to the <head> section of the SHOWTHREAD template:

<if condition="!$threadinfo['replycount']"><meta name="robots" content="noindex" /></if>
Member Avatar for hybr!d

Thanks dani, so far ive noindexed all member pages, forumdisplay pages and now 0 reply threads. They are all thin on content so nothing lost really.

Also removed 75% of the advertising and reduced page load times from +5sec down to 1.5sec approx.

Hopefully this will do, not sure what else i can do...

Again, thanks for the code snippet and your interview video, they really helped.

Dave.

Edited by hybr!d because: n/a
Member Avatar for hybr!d

Hello again,

Could you tell me how long after you made the changes it took to recover?

Also how sure are you the noindexing of these thin pages did the trick or was it possibly something else.

Thanks again, Dave.

Member Avatar for Nick Evan

>> I have see your video interview

Wait, what?

[edit]

Edited by Nick Evan because: n/a
Member Avatar for ~s.o.s~

I think we've got a celebrity with us. :)

Member Avatar for Dani

Oh I'm so embarassed by that video, and it went viral through the SEO community because DaniWeb is effectively the only fully documented Panda recovery.

commented: You shouldn't be, looking good in there. Oh and consider updating your avatar. ;-) +0
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