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[Frankiek]

As the title says what happened?

The search bar at the bottom of the page "enhanced by Google" used to be excellent but it is a while that most of the time the search yields no results and I am being asked to search the overall Google. So now I went back using the search a the top of the page that has some limitation but performs better.

If you want to replicate my issue just try to find the "Campaign Validator" using the two search bars and compare the results...

[SAS~Storebror]

Thanks for the heads up, I'll check that.

[SAS~Storebror]

Investigation finished.
Turns out that ever since Google started their "mobile first" initiative in 2020, the frequency of site indexing non-mobile-friendly sites is decreasing and the random errors are increasing.
Currently I've got a site indexing request from beginning of December 2023 pending with no single page having been re-indexed yet.
I've asked Google to re-index the site since in beginning of December their Bot went ballistic and complained about 97.000+ pages on sas1946 returning 403 errors, with only 1870 pages being left on the index.
Go figure...

So, for the time being, the search bar has been removed and you will have to rely on the forum's search function.

Responsive design aka mobile friendly sites is a feature of the SMF 2.1 upgrade, but unfortunately SMF 2.1 doesn't fully cover the SMF 2.0 feature set yet.


Mike

[Frankiek]

I was sure that the problem was linked to Google new aggressive marketing policy it is now more than a year that their search engine directs you manly to google "friendly" sites at the point that even Bing now performs better and more neutrally finally yielding better results.

I am also sure that the increased security concerns with many sites with good content being labelled unsafe because they don't have all the proper protocols and certificate in place possibly becoming a liability are cutting out a lot of content from search results.

Pity I am a Chrome/Google user since the very early days when MS-Explorer was mainstream so I was kind of attached to it. Too bad everything comes to an end and it seems I need to start looking for alternatives.