Google results often link to archived rather than live version of MacRumor posts!

[porg]

When I google Mac topics, and some of the results are forum posts at MacRumors,
they often tend to be the archived (static html) version, schematic URL:
https://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-ID.html
rather than the live (dynamic html) version of that post, schematic URL:
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=ID

The archived version has some negative user features:

• The page is shown as raw text (including the forum markup), rather than the formatted live version!
• Hence links are also non-clickable, you have to copy paste them manually.
• The interactive features (reply, quote, etc) also don't work! If you like to contribute to that thread, you have to copy the ID from the archived URL, find out the generic live URL, and then fill it with your desired ID, and only then you get the functionality!

Hence I suggest that you:

• Talk to Google and insure that they link to your live rather than your archived version URLs.
• If that is not possible, at least insert a link to the "live version" within a "archived version" page.

 

[angelwatt]

There is a link to the non-archived version, at least on all the ones I've come across. It's at the top in bold. MR doesn't really have a lot of control in how the site gets indexed.

 

[miles01110]

Use Mroogle (linked in angelwatt's signature) and set the date to "last X months." Depending on the time frame you select you'll get mostly "live" threads.

 

[porg]

Corrections concerning my suggestions:

• The archived MacRumor Forums already offer a link to the "live version" of a post. On the top of the page you find "View Full Version: Subject of the post". Sorry, that I did not see it!
• Concerning the issue, that Google rather lists the archived than the live version. Using the special purpose solution "Mroogle" is nice, but I rather prefer the full Google with mixed site's results, and now I know how to quickly get to the live version, with the comfortable "View Full Version" link rather than my previous URl copy'n'paste methods.
• Nevertheless, people who don't know this special MacRumor/vBulletin forum customs, will still more likely get to those archived versions (out of my web surfing experience). I still don't see the advantage of a publicly available raw text forum archive. Do you? They only sense that I could see, is that these posts are content which does not change at all or only very minimal, and hence has some stable ratings within search engines. But if this ain't the reason then MacRumors should try to make sure that either their live rather than archived versions get into the search engine indexes, or simply dump that archive versions, or put them into robots-no-index areas.

 

[miles01110]

MR isn't in charge of how Google's crawlers behave....

 

[GoCubsGo]

MR isn't in charge of how Google's crawlers behave....

He is right and for that this ...

Use Mroogle (linked in angelwatt's signature) and set the date to "last X months." Depending on the time frame you select you'll get mostly "live" threads.

Is the best bet.

 

[SilentPanda]

[*]Concerning the issue, that Google rather lists the archived than the live version. Using the special purpose solution "Mroogle" is nice, but I rather prefer the full Google with mixed site's results, and now I know how to quickly get to the live version, with the comfortable "View Full Version" link rather than my previous URl copy'n'paste methods.

If you do run a search with Google, you can still get MacRumors specific search results fairly easily if you wish. You can add "site:forums.macrumors.com" to the search if you want. Once you have done the search, if you click on "Show Options" near the top of the results, you can then change the timeframe to past 24 hours, past week, etc. There is probably something like "site:" for timeframe too but I don't know what it is as I don't use time frame too often.

Of course all this can be done via Mroogle too but I tend to not use Mroogle just because I tend to use the built in search in my web browser (CTRL K in Firefox). Although I don't search the MR site all that often except for moderator stuff and in that case the advanced forum search tends to suffice.