The forum's search feature was acting weird when you used more than one key word, so I deleted the old search index and re-indexed the native search database. It takes a while to do and it might affect search performance while it's going on. Hopefully, it will finish by tonight. It seems to work okay now when you use more than one keyword.

I noticed a while back that there's issues with google search indexes for results within maulepilots.
For example, a google search of [tailbeacon site:maulepilots.org] used to provide links to every instance of tailbeacon on this site.
Then when the forum upgrade happened, the google search would still display results from the previous forum, but clicking the link would send me to a broken page.
Now, nothing within the forum, new or old, is getting indexed on google.

Is there any setting you can enable that will let google find results from both versions of the forum?

Stinger wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 03, 2020 11:19 am

Is there any setting you can enable that will let google find results from both versions of the forum?

In the root directory of the website there may be a file 'robots.txt' that defines the access that bots are allowed.

We disabled bot access to the forum when we upgraded to phpBB 3.2, which is probably why Google Search can't index the new forum. We had a lot of problems with bots on the old forum. You can't get at the forum's search feature without logging on now. The internal search engine is the best way to search the forum. Although we could change that, it has successfully prevented a lot of spam. Unless there's a crucial need to enable bot access for search indexing, we would rather not allow it.

When we first upgraded to phpBB 3.2, we left the old phpBB 2 forum online as a separate site and Google searches could access it. However, the web hosting provider wanted to charge Christine an additional $100/year to support the outdated version of php used by the old forum so we took it off the site. Most of the data from the old site ported to the new site successfully but there were a few records that contained odd characters that didn't make it.

I noticed the inability to search via google as well. I use google images to search this site and others. It dramatically speeds up searches and finds things you just can’t otherwise. I believe you can put a line of code in that allows google access to the site so it can index every page. I kind of rely on this function.

I'll look into adding Google Search to the forum as an extension but I don't want to modify any of the standard files or disable the native search engine. Some extensions don't work when the forum software gets updated, which is why we haven't moved from 3.2 to 3.3.

I did some research on extensions that are available for phpBB 3.2 to incorporate Google's search engine. There's nothing out there that works any better than our Native phpBB Full Text search engine. I checked with Christine and we both feel that unless our own search engine isn't working properly, there's no need to add another search capability to the forum.

Based on the research that I did, the only way to improve Google Search's ability to index our forum is to open certain parts of the forum up to their bots. We prefer not to do that to avoid spam.