TAY posts are no longer found in Google searches

Interesting about the robots.txt file. Does TAY have one?

I don't have a definitive answer but I do know that TAY has always been lousy in the SEO dept... almost nothing in TAY ever shows up on any search I've ever done. Which can be a good thing... it lends TAY a "club-y" cozy, elite, old fashioned word of mouth feeling... Of course if you want to be found on the internet, a major design overhaul would be in order, which, given Marcus response... fat chance. In lieu of that, a refinement of TAY's "table" layout would help. Not sure how this translates with the SMF forum software (php).

Looking at the source code reveals that TAY consists of a of hugely nested table structure.
These tables could use more:
caption tags
thead tags
tfoot tags
etc.
adding descriptive information using the title attribute, in order to be better found by search engines.

Use of more TH table cell elements would communicate a richer hierarchy to search engine bots as well.

Since tables are tabular data, I imagine they also get relegated to a category of data that do not rate as top priority by search engines since it's not the type of data the average search engine user searches for (especially when deeply nested with little 'title' description).

It's not robots.txt, this is set to allow anyone to crawl any page:

www.turns-all-year.com/robots.txt

Just to be clear, I'd be happy to get the software current and make the site more friendly to mobile devices, etc.  I lack the knowledge base and the experience to make that happen, without an enormous amount of time and education that isn't available.

I'm happy to talk about it with folks who have that experience and might be willing to do the bulk of the heavy lifting on setting up a test environment and working on migrating the forum to more current software.  So far, folks willing to do that have been few and far between.

I'll look for a robots.txt file - no idea if it exists or not.  Adjusting the table elements may be more possible, but getting under the hood in the PHP files is something that I'm pretty cautious about, because I don't want to do the software equivalent of putting sugar in the gas tank.

EDIT - thanks Matt, I guess that answers that question.

One way to diagnose the problem:  Google has a service called "Webmaster Tools" used for just these types of things.  To use it you first need to the site by uploading a single HTML file Google provides, then you can see all sorts of information about problems they encountered while crawling and other information that might help diagnose the problem.  I'd suggest starting here, since it doesn't require any code changes and might point to something easy to fix.

www.google.com/webmasters/

Beyond that, you'll probably need to talk to a SEO or learn something about it yourself.  Full disclaimer: I work for a Seattle start-up that makes SEO software, and while I know the basics, I definitely not a SEO (I'm our chief scientist and analyze data/implement machine learning algorithms).  If you want to roll up your sleeves I can point you to a ton of educational resources or ask around for a recommendation about who to work with, but I don't want to spam the site if you aren't interested.

Edit to add: Marcus, I'd be happy to help where I can (i.e. interpret some of the webmaster information if possible ) but I'm not a PHP guy and really don't have time to undertake another large side project now.

Thanks Matt -- I'll take a look at those tools and see if I can parse them.

Feel free to PM me some info/resources re: SEO stuff. Again, it's nothing that I'm at all familiar with, so if there are things I can do to make the site more useful/effective, I'm happy to look into them.

I'm not 100% sure it's an SEO issue.

If the info isn't populating on google, it's a crawler issue, if it's not appearing on the top xyz pages of google, that's SEO.

I haven't looked much into this, but from what Amar was saying it looks to be a crawler issue which would be resolved by the robots.txt