Hi all,

One of the tables in the old database advertising itself as corrupt or crashed was the table holding information on the spider bots. Hence over the course of the last year the google ranking of club-xm has decreased falling further and further by the wayside. The new forum software was installed in a folder called forum whereas the previous forum software was installed in a folder called "forum2". If you look at the address bar you will now see that you are in the "forum" folder even though your shortcut might still be directing you to the "forum 2" folder. Thats because there's an automatic redirect on the old folder which semmlessly redirects you to the new one.

Consequently all the old hits on google for "folder2" were defunct and google didn't like that very much. I assumed that google would take months and months to reindex the site and bring club-xm back up the rankings. That was made worse by the fact that I ran the site through a seach engine optimiser only to find the there's no title, meta tags or keywords set. that was going to be my next port of call. It is possible to see the last time google visited any site by typing the following into the search bar (not the address bar) of google's front page:

"site:club-xm.com/forum"

Of course if you want to know that for another site you replace club-xm.com with another URL. When I tried that yesterday there was not one single hit. When I tried "site:club-xm.com/forum2" I got all the old broken hits from when the software wasn't working. However, I just tried the "forum" one again just now and I got 2,390 results. Wow. Although the currently-visiting spider bots are displayed on the front page of the forum I didn't think they were doing any good. They must have been saving up the indexing and publishing it in one fell swoop.

A search for Citroen XM on google gives club-xm.com second place to wikipedia. Wikipedia recently removed the link to club-xm. When I asked the moderators what the problem was and that the link had been there for the last 4 years I got a rather snotty reply and told that it was not appropriate to "advertise" another site even although it was dedicated to the model on that very wikipedia page. I was told that I was lucky it hadn't been removed sooner and would have been if it were not for the backlog.


Every day is a school day.

cheers

noz