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Hi,
can any more IT savvy people (almost everyone then) help me?
Lately , if I do a Google search, it shows results for this (and other) forums, with a fairly current date.
But when I go to the page, it turns out those posts are several years old.
Is there any way to get around this?
Thanks,
Good question. I've also noticed this but can't help with an answer.
Wtf I just googled Quantum Leap and it's all people from the.....future!!
I don't believe it
God damn you all to hell!
It's really annoying when you are using Google advanced search to try and find a topic you saw last week/last year and something Google thinks is 2 weeks old is actually 5 years 🙁
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a deliberate ploy to trick search engines into thinking they are serving up-to-date content and to increase revenue from clicks/hits. After all, we know and revenue is important to the site...
If the search worked you'd find the other recent posts on this.... current most annoying thing about the site imo. Nothing you can do I'm afraid, it's presumably something to do with the way the site presents and confuses itself to the Googlebot.
Yep I've searched for post titles and Google can't find them, even though they're only a few weeks old.
Only this site can somehow prevent Google properly indexing their content, it's the STW value add...
They probably spot Google's spiders from their IP and just feed it random ads to get their ad count up.
There was a recent thread outlining the reason for this. I'd link it here, but first I'd have to find it...
There are various bits of this forum that are quite shit. That is one of them. You just have to suck it up I’m afraid.
Oh and it’s nothing to do with your IT skills. It’s shit for everyone.
There are various bits of this forum that are quite shit. That is one of them
if I do a Google search, it shows results for this (and other) forums
whilst I’m still reeling from the bombshell thar there are other forums… this seems to point to the issue of then problem being a google (or maybe there are other search engines too, I’m not sure I can cope with two new revelations) issue rather than a site one. Could be something in the underlying forum software common across lots of sites maybe. Certainly didn’t seem to be an issue for STW in the past.
Fortunately it was my thread earlier, so I don't have to search for it.
Doesn't really help tbh but, at least shows to the owners and tech bods that we are not entirely plussed.
With the power that a search can bring to the forum, I am still surprised that it isn't in the top 3 of 'jobs to do'
https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/why-so-damn-difficult-to-get-meaningful-search-results/
problem being a google issue rather than a site one.
Given it only seems to happen with this site and the fact that nothing working properly being considered totally normal is also something unique to this site, I'd assume it's far more likely site related....
my guess would be even though the posts are old the pages that google indexes are regenerated with new ads or some guff like that so google thinks the content is new 🙁
Given it only seems to happen with this site
to you.
the op’s experience is otherwise
Fortunately it was my thread earlier, so I don’t have to search for it.
I think you'll find it was my thread akshully.
😝
https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/wtf-is-wrong-with-search-and-recent-howgills-thread/
I've promised to restart my subscription as soon as that and the "Threads I've Posted On" issues are fixed.
TBH I'm not holding out much hope ...
It is proper annoying, can’t think of another forum where this happens.. in Google search results “here are results from 7 days ago…. “Oh wait that is 7years!
It is indeed quite annoying. Only thing that's more annoying is people that ask a question that's been asked a millions times before and needn't have bothered if they'd not been too lazy to check and search first........oh.
On the plus side I like the nostalgia it generates. Earlier today I read an interesting post by PeterPoddy, after I did a search for Specialized Hover handlebar reviews. Google claimed the link was a few days old.
There is some advice:
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/03/help-google-search-know-best-date-for
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/article#non-amp
There's also a testing tool https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
Seems to pick up correct for news and reviews, but not the forum. I tried the tool with https://singletrackmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/deviate-highlander-29er-world-exclusive-review/ and https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/new-pedal-time-crank-brothers-vs-spd/
One difference I can spot is that forum pages have two ld+json structured data blocks, the 2nd one is for the streaming video by humix.com - that could well be confusing google. The tester tool I above is only picking up the data from the 2nd block.
That Google link (which I'd also posted on the previous thread) is pretty clear about what STW needs to do...
To help Google to pick the right date, site owners and publishers should:
Show a clear date: Show a visible date prominently on the page.
Use structured data: Use the datePublished and dateModified schema with the correct time zone designator for AMP or non-AMP pages. When using structured data, make sure to use the ISO 8601 format for dates.
STW are actually doing the second structured data bit - which would seem to be the hard bit. But they're not doing the first 'show a clear date' properly. The only dates shown are in the side bar on the news articles - so these show 'September 13, 2023'. If they changed the 'Posted 1 hour ago' bit to 'Posted 1 hour ago - September 13 22:20' then I expect Google would start indexing properly. If that doesn't work then the next thing I'd try is removing the dates from the side bar links.
Oh yes, I never noticed that before. Also happens if you search directly in google using site:www.singletrackworld.com
Hello. I’m from the future. We fixed the problem, but unfortunately all of the posts now have the wrong time stamp so it looks like I’ve posted from 2023.
And by the way, 26” is definitely dead now.
Long live 36”!
Jesus Christ, Joe Cocker died three times in the last week alone!
https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/joe-cocker-has-died/
Jesus Christ, Joe Cocker died three times in the last week alone!
🤣
It's clearly the reason why we have repeated 'what tyre' etc. threads, because when people try to find recent threads they find only threads from 10 years ago. I tried to find a thread recently for shiny tool ideas and gave up when posts from 5 days ago were in fact from 6 years ago.
It's not just this forum. been googling various fixes for diesel engines and the posts all appear recent on google
Ok. I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to knock the dates out of the RH column news feed.
Thanks for the useful feedback and suggestions up there 🙂
Done that/ I imagine that if it works it won't be instant as Google will need to recrawl the pages first.
Also, discussing with Anthony if we can display a date at the top of each topic showing it's original posting date.
STW are actually doing the second structured data bit – which would seem to be the hard bit.
As I said, it's wrong so it's not working. If this was fixed, none of the other stuff of would be necessary.
Thanks Mark for trying to fix it.
We shall see.
It’s clearly the reason why we have repeated ‘what tyre’ etc. threads, because when people try to find recent threads they find only threads from 10 years ago.
If I was a cynic, I'd suggest it was a deliberate ploy to drive up engagement and all the good stuff that flows from that. But I'm not a cynic, so I'm not saying that at all......