My issue is, still, noindex-tag. Google is bypassing all aswers in topics because of noindex, but those things users are googling — and indexing covers just questions.
Well, that can be fixed.
I also noticed that google, unlike bing, ignores the title of the discussion and I don’t understand why. This never happens with my other forum on SMF…
Errors that appeared on Bing Webmaster Tools this morning, I’ve been using it for a week on a new site.
The 12 pages reported have a meta description of 230 characters.
Could it be a problem for Google too?
I’m not sure it matters too much?
Tidying up titles and making them more accurate, readable and clickable is probably more important.
Also educate your users so they won’t mind you editing the title so it contains more keywords from the topic.
If you say that cleaning up the title and adding keywords makes searches more likely to find and popularise their topics, they won’t mind.
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I absolutely agree.
However, the error refers to the length of the meta description…
Write to Microsoft.
Ask them to stop kicking out High severity errors when its easier to either modify their bot or do a simple string truncate after 150 chars before saving to their DB?
Waste of good email. Bing can’t handle simple 301 redirections and is knocking over 5 years old 404s because of that.
Banning Bing saves resources and not harms anybodys SEO 
(And yes, I know we are doing off topic big time…)
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How does one remove the noindex tag?
Can it be done this way?
Or using plugin, as one dev told me — for me she’s asking to high price, though. Or using Varnish instead?
I really don’t know anything else that is told to me. All I know for sure is noindex is right now harming SEO on my forum.
I updated discourse every 3 days and I am noticing an improvement in searches, in some cases the threads are indexed after only 3 hours.
The same thing seems to me to be happening here (for example this one indexed after 3 hours), the most important thing is that now the words contained in the title are finally displayed in the search result.
Great job!
I hope it continues like this…
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This topic prompted us to look into the issue and @sam made lots of improvements over the last couple of weeks. We’ve been closely monitoring how many newly created topics here on Meta are missing from the Google index. That number has been decreasing every day.
WOW
… stuff is getting better every day! Not a single missing topic on the week of the 13th!!!
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