Simple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 2

Mar 09 2007

Friday, 09 March 2007

Yesterday we compared the metadata produced by three different forum setups for Joomla sites:

Simple Machines integrated with Joomla
Simple Machines unintegrated with Joomla
VBulletin

Today, we're going to take that a step further and see how well these forums suceed in getting the posts indexed. We'll also see how many of those posts end up in Google's regular index and how many end up in Google's supplemental index where most searchers will never find them. (Click here to find out more about the supplemental index.)

How did we calculate these figures?

Total Posts. We went to the forum and used their own statistics.
Pages Indexed. site: http://forum.joomla.org. This show all your pages indexed by Google.
Pages in Supplemental Index. site: http://forum.joomla.org *** -sljktf. This show all your pages in the supplemental index.
Percentage of posts compared to indexed pages. The closer this number is to 100, the better.
Percentage of indexed pages in the supplemental index. The closer this number is to 0, the better.

Joomla Supplemental Pages

	Joomlart [-]	Joomla .org [-]	Joomla .de [-]	J. Shack [-]	R. Theme [-]	J Prosol. [-]	Joomla .fr [-]	Mosets [-]
Forum Software	VBulletin	Simple Machines (not integrated)	VBulletin	Simple Machines (integrated)	Simple Machines (integrated)	VBulletin	VBulletin	VBulletin
Total Posts	9,109	720,130	390,000	17,166	42,377	13,292	27,035	16,176
Pages Indexed	78,800	157,000	201,000	13,200	14,200	6,120	78,100	12,700
Pages in Supplemental Index	74,200	144,100	172,000	10,900	10,600	4,530	50,500	7,980
Percentage of posts compared to indexed pages	865	21	51	76	33	46	288	78
Percentage of indexed pages in the supplemental index	94	91	85	82	74	74	64	62.8

What can we learn from these results?

Both Joomla.org and RocketTheme.com have a very low percentage of their posts indexed by Google. Both use Simple Machines. JoomlaShack also uses SMF has done a great job by getting around three-fourths of its posts indexed.
It seems clear that a well set up VBulletin forum does a better job of keeping pages out of Google's supplemental index although it is far from a cure-all as Joomlart's results show.

Without knowing more about the technical aspects of the various sites its hard to diagnose what is causing the differences. However, these tests are important ones that you can run regularly. There is nothing wrong with having pages in the supplemental index, nor with not having 100% of your pages indexed. However, you do need to test often in order to make sure that your site is moving in the right direction. A sudden shift of 10% of your pages into the supplemental index can have a huge affect on your earnings.

Finally, full disclosure - this is where Alledia.com stands. Bear in mind that our site should be doing better than a forum, because it is much easier to keep regular content pages out of the supplemental index, compared to forum pages: