query on search engines

[Argus]

Would the names we give topics influence how likely they would be seen by search engines? By a significant degree?

[bush_cheney2004]

Not sure what you mean, but search engines crawl and index any sites they can find and determine a ranking based on how many instances of the topic/title terms exist and the age of the content.   Businesses and bloggers can purposely influence search results with optimization (SEO services).

The search engine web crawlers will grab the content and process it with algorithms, pushing the most relevant/timely to the top of the index.

If the topic title/content is trending across multiple sites then it is far more likely to be indexed and ranked higher than other obscure topics/content.

 

[Charles Anthony]

I enter "query on search engines" into my favorite web-crawler and I get this here your thread 3 doors down.  

[Argus]

Interesting.

I wonder if that's why "What i think about Donald Trump" has 730 views even though there's only 2 posts. I don't think we have very many active members so most of those must have found it via search engines.

[Greg]

On 11/1/2021 at 5:48 PM, Argus said:

Would the names we give topics influence how likely they would be seen by search engines? By a significant degree?

Yes, very much. It's the reason why Charles and I appreciate it when people correctly structure the opening post of any new thread - including a descriptive topic title, etc.

While the IPB software isn't the most SEO optimized forum software in the world (by a long shot), the most recent update attempted to "fix" a lot of the issues. They still don't use header tags, and other vital markup that Google (and other SE like Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc) use to better understand what we're all talking about, but it's an improvement nonetheless.

18 hours ago, Charles Anthony said:

I enter "query on search engines" into my favorite web-crawler and I get this here your thread 3 doors down.  

And for me, it's way down at the bottom of the first page. Google personalizes search now, so it highly unlikely anyone will get the exactly same result as someone else. Much depends on your prior searches and the whether you're logged into your Google Account, etc.

[Argus]

2 minutes ago, Greg said:

Yes, very much. It's the reason why Charles and I appreciate it when people correctly structure the opening post of any new thread - including a descriptive topic title, etc.

So the opening post also has a noticeable effect, and not just the title?

[Greg]

Yes, most definitely.

Google bot is just an ignorant spider that crawls the web indexing what it can, no amount of engineering (or magic) can allow it to better understand what someone is trying to say if the forum topic/post is an inconsistent/unstructured rant.

[Charles Anthony]

To add: proper grammar helps.   A good guide is whether the text translates clearly in a 2nd or 3rd language. 

This is where MLW is top notch.  Nearly everybody here writes in complete sentences.