Discourse forum posts are not being indexed by Google?

Content Management Systems (CMS) Discourse
1

Hi, I recently started a self hosted Discourse forum. I’ve submitted sitemap to Google. I can see that forum categories and tags are indexed but not the actual posts. Why is that? How do I get forum posts indexed?

3 Likes
2

Let’s dig in. Firstly let us know how did you check to find out that posts are not indexed?
Have you checked xml sitemaps?
Have you submitted xml sitemap on Google Search Console?

3

I did some searches on Google for the post title, no result showed up. then I did site:mydomain.com and none of the posts are listed there. I can only see categories and tags listed. I did submit mydomain.com/sitemap.xml on Google Search Console.

4

Ok, so it seems you have checked it correctly. Try following solution

  1. On sitemap.xml you will see other sitemap files listed, submit all of them to Google Search Console.
  2. Use Yandex webmaster tool https://webmaster.yandex.com. Submit sitemaps there as well
  3. Do the same on Bing webmaster tool.

Waif for a week or so and then check the indexing again.

I’ve found that yandex indexes all posts quickly and it is far more better to find out any indexing issue than Google. Google takes 2 weeks+ of time to start indexing all files on a site.

1 Like
5

Thanks @technuisance I’ll follow your suggestions.

6

Give it some more time. Promote your forum, do seo, get backlinks, post on social media etc etc. and then wait for like 3-4 months. Some of your most popular threads will start showing up under 10 pages if not on the first page of search result. If you can make it in the top 10 pages of search result then you can assume that you are on a roll.

7

It has been over three weeks since I started this thread. I can see that Google is still not indexing all my content specially the threads. I do see some threads have started to appear at the top of Google search result but when I check for indexing on search or in Google Search Console then it doesn’t show anything at all. It is even not showing any backlinks. Why is that? Am I still missing something?

8

You need to dig down deeper. I recommend checking Google indexing in details to find out what exactly it is indexing and what it is not. Forget about the search result atm. Getting the top position on Google search is no longer an easy task. Once you have fixed the indexing issue then you can think of SERP.