Forum topics appear as .COM in search engines

[Oso]

A question I've wanted to know the answer to for ages — why search engines list a number of PureBasic forum topics as .com when they are in the .fr domain, albeit within the /english forum. For instance when I searched for purebasic set console dimensions it returns forums.purebasic.com/english...

This doesn't appear to be specific to particular search engines and even quite recent topics appear as .com. A search can be performed on site:purebasic.fr/english but in fact the results of that search do not generally include the same results as the non-specific search. Anyway, it's easy to edit the URL, but I'd love to know why it happens.

[NicTheQuick]

In the past the board was available over https://forums.purebasic.com/english
Unfortunately today that URL responds with a 302 (Moved temporarily) instead of 301 (Moved permanently). Because of that Google won't update its internal index and will keep the old URLs in its search result. If forums.purebasic.com would respond with a 301 the search result would be correct after a while. But with a 302 Google thinks the domain will eventually not redirect itself anymore in the future and therefore keeps these results in its search index.

Another thing I just found out:
While the non-secure version of the old URL works just fine: http://forums.purebasic.com/english/index.php
The secure one does not: https://forums.purebasic.com/english/index.php

I think there should be another 301 (Moved Permanently) redirect for the non-secure version of the URL too.

[ChrisR]

Thanks for the explanation NicTheQuick, it's quite recent and boring
At first, I was changing .com into .fr in the url but now I always use: site:www.purebasic.fr keywords
I hope it can be solved by PB team

[BarryG]

it's quite recent and boring

Actually, it's been like this and an on-going issue since 2009 (see Rescator's post) -> viewtopic.php?t=37898

There's also been discussions about it as well, where searching the forum produces wrong results depending if you search the ".com" vs ".fr" domains.

I don't think the team is interested in solving it, based on the timeframe.

[Oso]

Actually, it's been like this and an on-going issue since 2009 (see Rescator's post) -> viewtopic.php?t=37898

Yes, I've been assuming that it was only happening with old forum posts, when the forum was perhaps under a .com, but today I noticed one of my recent posts is being indexed under the .com domain.

A consequence is that potential newcomers who might have happened to see something about PB by chance in a search, will get the 'not found' page and thus unlikely to go any further.

Thanks to @NicTheQuick for the explanation. Why are search engines not also indexing on the .fr domain though? I notice they are in some cases, but not all.

[ChrisR]

Actually, it's been like this and an on-going issue since 2009 (see Rescator's post) -> viewtopic.php?t=37898

This is not something really new, indeed, but I also noticed that it has been getting worse recently, I guess in connection with NicTheQuick's statement!
Just for fun, this topic here in 2nd under .com

[Fred]

Could you try again, I changed the apache config, may be it will fix this.

[ChrisR]

Thank you for taking the time to look at Fred
I am a bit mixed. It seems a bit better when looking for old topics with .fr at the top
But for more recent topics, .com is still displayed in 1st place in the search results (without redirection so URL not found)
Search ex: purebasic Forum topics appear as .COM in search engines
And it doesn't find this topic at all if I search with: site:www.purebasic.fr forum topics appear as com in search engines

[Lord]

Maybe search engines have to crawl again to get new locations.

[Fred]

Links using forums.purebasic.com are not broken anymore here.

[NicTheQuick]

I can check this later when I am at home. But we also have to give Google some time to update their indexes if we are not able to trigger this manually inside the Google Webmastertools.

[NicTheQuick]

Links using forums.purebasic.com are not broken anymore here.

What exactly did you change?

This URL still works but should return a 301: http://forums.purebasic.com/english/index.php
This one temporarily redirects to the wrong URL: https://forums.purebasic.com/english/index.php

If you need help with Apache you can write me a PN.

[ChrisR]

Links using forums.purebasic.com are not broken anymore here.

Unfortunately, this is not the case here, still the page Not Found, the requested URL was not found on this server.
For the .fr in search results, as said by Lord and NicTheQuick, we need to give some time to Google to update the new indexes.