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By JamesJeffery Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:11 pm
Just spotted this when searching Google, thought I'd give you the heads up:

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The issue being the number 1 is showing for all but 1 subforum in the Google results.

I believe it's because of the following line in your source code:

Code: Select all<a href="#" onclick="jumpto(); return false;" title="Click to jump to pageā€¦">Page <strong>1</strong> of <strong>267</strong></a></li>


This part:

Code: Select all<strong>1</strong>


For non logged in users (such as Google's bot) the first <strong> element on the page is the line above. So Google is taking this to be the most important part of the page.

You could try remove the strong element from the pagination, and wrapping it around the last element in the breadcrumbs menu. I'm not sure why Google is missing the <h3> element around the sub forums title. <h3> should carry more weight than <strong>, but because <strong> appears in multiple places that contain the number 1 they may be taking that to be of more value.

There's more information on using sitelinks here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en

I'm not sure if this will hurt SEO in the long run, as MPC Forums is pretty well established and trusted in Google, but it doesn't look nice for the user searching.

Hope that helps :)
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By MPC-Tutor Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:47 pm
Oddness - cheers for taking the time to look into that. Seems more like a google bug as it's showing some cateogries fine (ren, other samplers) - it seems somewhat arbitrary, there's certainly no reason why it would be choosing that strong element over a h3 or even the <title> tag itself.

I'll see what can be done, trouble is it'll probably take a few days for Google to reindex so it's tricky to experiment with something like this.
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By MPC-Tutor Tue Apr 19, 2016 3:17 pm
I think it's probably more related to the links after the 'page 1 of 5' bit, the actual pagination itself, where we have '1', '2', '3' etc. So on sub page 2 for a particular forum, the page '1' link is an active link directly back to that sub forum home page (with no additional parameters added). With so many different pages pointing back to the sub forum home page using '1' as the anchor text, Google is assuming '1' is the correct title for that page - from what I'm reading, that's how Google decides on the things for this particular feature.

Not sure what to do about that, I could add some title text to the '1' link (title="MPC1000 Forum"), perhaps that would help, but hopefully it's something Google will sort out itself as I know 100% that it has never done this for mpc-forums in the past, so perhaps they're currently tinkering with the script that handles sitelinks.

EDIT - actually the fix now seems obvious, Google says it calculates sitelinks based on the pages that get the most internal links, so I reckon I just have to put some site wide links to all the main forum pages in the navigation, perhaps a 'Forums' drop down (which actually seems like a good idea anyway), and some footer links to the main sub forums. 1.5 million links with the preferred anchor text should do the trick.
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By JamesJeffery Tue Apr 19, 2016 3:43 pm
EDIT - actually the fix now seems obvious, Google says it calculates sitelinks based on the pages that get the most internal links, so I reckon I just have to put some site wide links to all the main forum pages in the navigation, perhaps a 'Forums' drop down (which actually seems like a good idea anyway), and some footer links to the main sub forums. 1.5 million links with the preferred anchor text should do the trick.


Ha! That's not a bad idea actually. Hopefully that fixes it.

A quick Google search for "student rooms" (popular student forum in the UK) shows their sub forums showing correctly. Could see how they're doing it, they use VB too. Parents here atm, so can't check.
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By MPC-Tutor Fri May 13, 2016 10:26 am
JamesJeffery wrote:Just noticed this morning that its fixed.

Did you change anything in the end?

Yes, I added the 'Forums' drop down to the top menu. This provided the required anchor link text for all the primary forum sections. With this menu appearing on every page Google assumes the anchor text used here is more authoritative than the '1' links from the pagination.
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By JamesJeffery Fri May 13, 2016 10:35 am
MPC-Tutor wrote:
JamesJeffery wrote:Just noticed this morning that its fixed.

Did you change anything in the end?

Yes, I added the 'Forums' drop down to the top menu. This provided the required anchor link text for all the primary forum sections. With this menu appearing on every page Google assumes the anchor text used here is more authoritative than the '1' links from the pagination.


Ahhh. At least its sorted now :) Google takes forever to reindex things.
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By JUKE 179r Fri May 13, 2016 1:24 pm
You guys are a bunch of computer nerds... cool computer nerds nonetheless... :lol:
By adriano Tue Jan 08, 2019 7:11 pm
MPC-Tutor wrote:I think it's probably more related to the links after the 'page 1 of 5' bit, the actual pagination itself, where we have '1', '2', '3' etc. So on sub page 2 for a particular forum, the page '1' link is an active link directly back to that sub forum home page (with no additional parameters added). With so many different pages pointing back to the sub forum home page using '1' as the anchor text, Google is assuming '1' is the correct title for that page - from what I'm reading, that's how Google decides on the things for this particular feature. HostGator DreamHost Bluehost

Not sure what to do about that, I could add some title text to the '1' link (title="MPC1000 Forum"), perhaps that would help, but hopefully it's something Google will sort out itself as I know 100% that it has never done this for mpc-forums in the past, so perhaps they're currently tinkering with the script that handles sitelinks.

EDIT - actually the fix now seems obvious, Google says it calculates sitelinks based on the pages that get the most internal links, so I reckon I just have to put some site wide links to all the main forum pages in the navigation, perhaps a 'Forums' drop down (which actually seems like a good idea anyway), and some footer links to the main sub forums. 1.5 million links with the preferred anchor text should do the trick.
You guys are a bunch of computer nerds... cool computer nerds nonetheless... :lol:
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By Lampdog Tue Jan 08, 2019 9:42 pm
But, but, your here to.

:lol:

Happy New Year Adriano.

For some reason my mind wants to say "A"
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