I'm using the php sphider search engine to index and search my website. vBulletin is just a part of the website. vBulletin still uses its internal search engine for local searches but I also need to be able to include vBulletin content in my site wide search. To do this i'm using the sphider search engine, however i'm having difficulties indexing the forums properly. When I index it searchs absolutly everything which includes a whole lot of meaningless content (for example it searches the calendars (which are empty) for what seems like forever). Are there any general rules for improving the searchability of the forums short of adding a hundred different rules to the search engine to prevent it from going places it shoudn't.
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You would have to configure your search program to ignore content from specific pages. This is not really a vB issue but one with that search program.Steve Machol, former vBulletin Customer Support Manager (and NOT retired!)
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Sphider is really good here - it is showing you general spidering problems with your forum. If sphider follows these links then so will Googlebot. My suggestion is that you disallow the URLs you do not want Sphider to see in a robots.txt file. This way you can control what it will index and what it won't.
By using:
User-agent: *
You can stop all bots getting into the Calendar area. If you want Googlebot to see member profiles but you don't want sphider indexing them or vice-versa then you can set up rules in your robots.txt to do this too.
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widgetinstance 262 (Related Topics) skipped due to lack of content & hide_module_if_empty option.
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