forum not showing in google results
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quite a difference when searching for something specific on the forum
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@nick9one1 said in forum not showing in google results:
This probably isn't the correct place for this, but I dont think there is a discussion that fits.
I don't think 'Order discussion' is the right place for this. Moved to General Discussion.
Clearly our SEO needs... er... optimising. Thanks!
Ian
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Yes I get the same.
Google;
The statement ”You visit often” tells the story: Google tracks your requests (and a lot of other things), then tries to shape the search results according to your profile. Obviously, in your case, its algorithm comes to the wrong conclusions, depriving you from exactly the most obvious hit for a search term which expressis verbis includes the word ”forum”.
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@infiniteloop Doing a search using an "incognito" browser tab also seems to give me the same poor results, of course it could be that "incognito" is actually not very incognito as far as google is concerned!
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our SEO needs... er... optimising.
With respect of specific searches aimed at this forum, I agree, especially as the local search function often yields sub-optimal results. But given the two terms ”duet” and ”forum”, any search engine should return a direct link within its first 10 proposals.
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@infiniteloop Well, this is odd. Usually, if I need to search the forum, I use the google 'site' search option, eg
site:https://forum.duet3d.com 6hc
But doing that only returns a few 'assets', not any web pages. It's almost like google has lost it's ability to search the site.
Edit: Bing and DuckDuckGo produce full results.
Ian
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Doing a search using an "incognito" browser tab also seems to give me the same poor results
With Safari on a Mac, "incognito" does little more than excluding my browsing history from the logs. Fingerprints used by Google et. al. to identify me and/or my machine still work, I'm perfectly visible to the outside. Turning off cookies and JavaScript may help a bit, but at the cost of no longer being able to surf today's web.
OTOH, I have no intimate knowledge of Google's algorithms. It's just that DuckDuckGo acts as an intermediary, so the "intelligent" algorithms can't tune in to me. It may also be that DuckDuck, in this case, returns a hit from "dumb" search engines who just look at the URLs… All I can say is that, using a sequence of keywords, the results pretty much match my expectations.
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@infiniteloop My understanding is that when using incognito mode Chrome starts with a "fresh" environment so it initially has no cookies etc. Certainly when I use that mode I'm not logged into google or any other account. But that may not stop google from identifying me by other means.
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if I need to search the forum, I use the google 'site' search option
Confession: I didn't even know that option, battled the internal search instead
But doing that only returns a few 'assets', not any web pages. It's almost like google has lost it's ability to search the site.
That's really bad news. Smells like serious work ahead… Although, reading your Edit, I'm in luck: can't wait to try the 'site' search option with my DuckDuck - thanks for pointing that out.
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@gloomyandy
You are right, Safari works similar to Chrome (with respect to "privacy").But that may not stop google from identifying me by other means.
Exactly. That's why they use "fingerprinting", which, in effect, is a huge collection of any characteristics and data they can grab from a client. One data point, for example, once was the access time of the internal HDD (not sure about SSDs, though), measured on a cookie… If you know about buffering, caches and all that internal stuff, it's hard to believe, but they told me this bit could help (a bit) to recognise an already known machine. Not to talk about mac addresses, IPs, CPU (model, clock rate etc.), screen size plus other hardware and OS characteristics. Talking of the OS: digging a bit into what my macOS can tell me, I stopped wondering.