I usually use Google to find old Typophile threads, but lately I've been getting really poor results. For example, doing a search with
site:typophile.com flash player text engine
only returns *one* result -- this one http://typophile.com/node/29359?page=8 -- which is actually quite inaccurate. I was obviously expecting more results, and at least this page (http://typophile.com/node/45368) on the list.
Is anyone been having a similar experience? Is this a Google glitch or a Typophile issue?
Search engines are generally not very good at handling Flash content (although Google does try to index Flash, to some extent) Hint: try navigating Typophile without having Flash Player installed (or using Flash Block).
Typophile is built on Drupal. I think the only Flash content is the homepage, the header, and the sidebar. So Google shouldn't have any problems indexing the pages. In any case, I've used this search pattern many times in the past and it worked well then.
Yeah, I've been having trouble using Google to search older typophile threads too.
Replying to your subject line: yes, and it seems to have worsened recently. I was trying to find printer recommendations in the archives today, and what Google finds is… dire. Also, the Google Cache links are unreliable at best, and it seems to find outdated forum listings rather than actual threads.
So what's up with Typophile's own search engine – did it work better in the past?
Drupal is an odd beast.
Flash isn't an issue once in the forums, but as far as I can tell, there's no HTML link on the home page to the forums, which could be a hindrance to google getting in with any regularity.
It might also help to make the thread titles H1 tags instead of H2.
Maybe Punchut reduced crawling rate in Google webmaster tools to reduce server load...
When the spider visits theres one bad flash link on the homepage to the forum, which have 60 links, and hundreds on the general discussions page. I guess if the spider doesnt come often enough it will miss some pages with hundreds of links to chose from and only one flash link pointing in.
Just speculation...
Could it be be that the sudden explosion in blog entries by students is making a mess of the Google index?
The 'typophile as a student classroom' is a tad annoying, but that shouldn't cause any issues with google.
My hunch is that there's just no links on the home page. That might be remedied by submitting a sitemap to google regularly.
Yes, I've noticed that it doesn't work any more.
Maybe they really are evil after all? Just sayin...
Just adding to the chorus... Me, too! Grr!
For those who didn't know: for quite a while now, Typophile users have been using Google to search for Typophile threads, since it was working better than Typophile's search engine. Grant Hutchinson had even created a favelet to let us search Typophile using Google...
Yes, I’m very annoyed, too.
The site search (with Grant’s favelet or without) used to work like charm and brought up all relevant entries, no matter if they were added only half an hour ago or dating back to 2003.
Recently, all I usually get is links to paged listings, like some user’s tracking pages.
Also, hits are listed with nothing but their non-speaking url, i.e. without title or description.
In my opinion, feed entries (urls containing ‘crss’) shouldn’t be indexed. I want the real thing, not the feed of it.
Just 2 examples for queries that have delivered a couple of dozens hits before, and now hardly a single useful one. At least one of them actually has a Wiki entry (which can’t be found):
Furthermore, it seems Typophile has no proper 404 page, at least not for URLs of this scheme: http://www.typophile.com/node/nonsense. That link would take me to a wild potpourri of random posts and blog entries.
Ditto from here.
Yes, I noticed it too.
Me too.
Yes. Can anybody do anything about it?
Please ;)
A new, related thread:
Hey all,
It was just brought to our attention that there are issues with indexing. I don't have any answers as of yet, but we'll be looking into it.
Thanks all for the feedback,
z
Something has been fixed. My search for ‘Unica’ now brings up 599 hits (was 3), ‘featured face’ has 1.480 (was 4).
Most of the hits still are unhelpful ‘Search’ pages, non-existent Wiki entries or dead links to old message pages (typophile.com/forums/messages/some/number). And OP Miguel’s query still delivers merely one poor hit.
Nevertheless, it’s a great improvement. Thanks!
It is surprising that advertising people do not know nor care that the simpler the html stuff of a website, the more hits will result.
I looked at the html internals of this "Is anyone else getting poor results..." thread, and it became clear for me why the Google results are so poor. For instance, this tiny thread alone has 30 picture links, a big css file, several php files, several js files and other stuff. Google's crawler would need too many seconds to evaluate this tiny thread, considering that Google tries to evaluate all websites of the entire world. The consequence is that Google simply skips many websites.
The simpler the html stuff, the better for the Google crawler. For instance, my website has the simplest html imaginable (no css, no php, no js, etc.). The web design looks drab drab drab, but the hits are huge huge huge.
Taking into consideration that my website deals with the rarest topics imaginable (e.g. the ancient Sanskrit language, which is studied by only very few people worldwide), the download hits for these very specialized files at my website are enormeous. In February, so far, for instance the pdf file cdrfonts.pdf was downloaded 1056 times, the txt file unicode.txt was download 817 times, and the "Sanskrit 2003" font sans2003.zip was downloaded 813 times. All this only at the www.sanskritweb.NET site (I also run www.sanskritweb.DE and www.sanskritweb.ORG as mirrow sites with separate download statistics).
So, if you want to have many hits at the Typophile site brought about by Google search, then simplify the html stuff as much as possible so that it is easy for Google to evaluate your site.
> So, if you want to have many hits at the Typophile site brought about by Google search, then simplify the html stuff as much as possible so that it is easy for Google to evaluate your site.
While this is in most cases true... in this case I don't think so. Because it used to work without any problems whatsoever. But all of a sudden it doesn't anymore. So the problem must lie elsewhere. There might be more than one reason, but the way this site is coded hasn't changed much lately, so I doubt that plays a role.
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