CMS Made Simple Forums

installed cmsms no problems. added and modified content no problems. submitted to Google. Google isn't only indexing the 20 or so pages which i have created, it's indexing all 250 or so pages included in the cmsms default installation!
Also regarding new bulletins, i have created some news page but Google is duplicating those pages over and over...
My url is: southcoastwater.co.uk
If anyone has any ideas I'd be very grateful to hear about them. Thanks in advance.

Hello,

A)If YOU publish 250 pages (of sample content) on the public Internet, how shall the bots know they should NOT index them ?
B)If you do NOT publish them, how could the bots ever index them (without knowing about their existence) ?

A)Have you read Google guidelines and tuned your robots.txt accordingly ?
B)Have you tried to DEactivate the root of the sample hierarchy ?

Have you read README FIRST with System Info and so ?

Have you searched the forum for "news pretty URLs" or other user friendly URL things ? (hence bots friendly)

Pierre M.

running: "site:southcoastwater.co.uk" on Google returns 72 pages. And possible sources of your problem. I saw you are most likely using the google webmaster tools. What errors do you get there (look for duplicate content and crawler issues and such)?

Anyway, looks like you are mixing up pretty and unpretty urls in your configuration. Which means: you have several kinds of  links for the same item. One rewritten and one original (and probably another situation). So most likely somewhere within one or more of your templates you made a mistake.

Suggest two things in your case:

1) Implement the rel=canonical element in your templates. It will help to tell mayor search engines about the correct URL for your
content (search for "rel canonical" in forum).

2) Browse your site and look for the wrong links. Those that read ...index.php?page=... (if these are the ones you want to have eliminated). Now check your templates and see if something that you have done to show the link requires a parameter, setting or other precondition.

It also seemed like you had the internal search results page in the index. You do not need it there . You should also add this tag to all other kinds of pages/templates you do not want to appear in the index. However, be careful how you use it as this tells the SE to ignore this page.

3) Place meta tag into your search results page head area

Afterwards, you might want to check your site with a simple crawler http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html. It's a simple tool, give it a start point and it checks if links are alirght and what links it had found where.

Wait a few weeks and you should be clean again. This should provide you with a starting point. It's difficult to really help with that vague information.

Best
Nils

I have had alot of the same issues with my site (www.shareworld.co.uk), before I done some major sorting out, google and xml-sitemaps.com was indexing around 2500 urls on my site!! (In actual fact I only have 400-500 pages on my site).

The way I tackled the problem was to index my site using xml sitemaps.com (this is free for the basic version) or the link sleuth is also a very good tool. Then you just need to look for duplicate urls or ones you dont want included.

Now if you create a robots.txt file (look it up on Google) you can include in there all the pages/directories that you dont want indexed, that will be a start. - In my experience I found that the "news" module caused a bit of an issue for me - I had about 50 news items (daily market news) and they were linked to from every page on my site - but they had a different link on every page, so they were being seen as thousands of unique urls!!! I made the decision to disallow this particular news group from being indexed and that sorted out the majority of my problems).

Next as Nhaak says:
"2) Browse your site and look for the wrong links. Those that read ...index.php?page=... (if these are the ones you want to have eliminated). Now check your templates and see if something that you have done to show the link requires a parameter, setting or other precondition."

This is important as you may find pages are being indexed twice: once by index.php/page=so-and-so and once as a pretty url:
index.php/group/so-and-so.html So decide if you are using pretty urls or not, then make sure all the links you create within the site follow the same protocol.

Finally, also mentioned previously, use google webmaster tools - submit your sitemaps and check the listed errors - if you resolve all the errors that Google lists then you will be some way towards having an SEO friendly site that Google will concider highly.

Lastly, as an aside, validate your code:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http% ... ne&group=0

You only have a few errors so shouldnt be much work but it will be a big help as far as SEO is concerned.

And also, nice site:)