[imported_silkroad]

Originally Posted by NLP-er

Good point - thanks :up:

Thanks. Yea, the problem is that there is no other way (that we know of) to inform GoogleBot of the update frequencies, it is really inefficient to have Google just crawling for the sake of it without any "brains", especially for large forums.

Here is my other suggestions / recommendation for the future:

• Using mod_rewrite, rewrite /forum/....html?hl=foo to be either /forum/foo/...html or /forum/....-foo.html

Modify vBSEO sitemap to change the way they have suggested indexing the flags:

• Do not sitemap index like this:

index.html
index.html?hl=ja
index.html?hl=foo

Index like this (keep original content in tact):

index.html
forum/thread1.html
forum/thread2.html
forum/thread-etc.html

and then do an entire language as a group:

index.html
forum/thread1-ja.html
forum/thread2-ja.html
forum/thread-etc-ja.html

Repeat.

The reason for this is that it is easier to manage the (long term) indexing process if the language links are all nice and neat in a few sequencial sitemap files v. interwoven around each link. (The "interwoven process" in a nightmare, quite frankly).

Sorry, but the solution offered by the vBSEO team, while better than nothing, is not very manageable for large boards if you care about the convergence of Googles index with your sitemap. (Everyone should care if they care about SEO).

We track this on a weekly basis and have currently have nearly 92% convergence. Google does not keep dumping and recrawling, etc. (as it currently happening with the translated links) because there is no update frequency associated with the hl=foo links :erm:

Cheers.