Now 8,160 results. Quite a lot of duplicate results with the same threads appearing a number of times due to the 20 posts per page style navigation.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to make Beehive show all messages in a thread on a single page whenever it knows that the page is being viewed by a search engine bot.

Hmm.

Hmm, I'd say it's fine once it points to the appropriate page where the relevant result(s) are found.


What it should do is have navigational link tags.

i.e. plonk this in head:

<link rel="contents" href="lthread_list.php?webtag=DEFAULT"/>
<link rel="first"    href="lmessages.php?webtag=DEFAULT&msg=2226.1"/>
<link rel="previous" href="lmessages.php?webtag=DEFAULT&msg=2226.1921"/>
<link rel="next"     href="lmessages.php?webtag=DEFAULT&msg=2226.1961"/>
<link rel="last"     href="lmessages.php?webtag=DEFAULT&msg=2226.2331"/>
<link rel="up"       href="lthread_list.php?webtag=DEFAULT&folder=1"/>

(using msg:2226.1941 as an example; would actually be variable, obviously)

Done. Lets see if that makes a difference.

What's that do then?

Ahh, sign posts for spiders then. Got it.

It tells users (including search engines) where the next/previous/etc pages are in relation to the current page, giving them a structural context that might not be obvious (for a bot) based solely on regular hyperlinks.

In theory, it improves the ability of a search engine to return relevant information (e.g. if two results are otherwise ranked equal, but one preceeds the other, it probably makes sense to list the first as the primary match), and Google generally rewards the correct use of semantic metadata.

All of which hopefully means Google will pay more attention to the site in general, and give it better placing in search rankings.