This forum's search feature is weak, at best. So, for years, I've instead used Google as my search engine for the forum by adding "site:themagiccafe.com" to the search query. It worked beautifully. That is, until fairly recently. Now it is rare to get a hit (that I'm looking for).

Has the forum code been changed to prevent Google bots from crawling the forum?

Also, there's a site called brotts.com that appears to be duplicating the content from the Magic Cafe. If crawling the Cafe with bots has been shut off, is brotts.com the reason for the change?

Mark

When you get that, change "Brotts" in the url to "Themagiccafe" for a workaround.

Mark, I've noticed the same thing. I received an email over the weekend from someone wanting to buy my Entertainer's Business Toolkit book. He wanted to read some reviews first so he googled the Magic Cafe Entertainer's Business Toolkit and received the Brotts site. When clicking on the link he was asked to login and it told him he didn't have access to the content.

This was the first I've heard of all this. I thought maybe it was a torrent site?

It's a test site for site builders.

Mark, nothing has changed on the Cafe but here's a recent topic about the bott site. https://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/view......forum=50

Basicaly it's a site that's used to test changes and edits to the Cafe and is only available to the techs.

Yeah, I'm getting very, very few, if any, search results when I search in Google. Very strange. My wife does Search Engine Optimization for her job and says that it probably has to do with outdated backend site maintenance of the Cafe and hasn't kept pace with Google.

Yep, previously, when I used Google to search for, say, "Chinese Sticks site:themagiccafe.com", I would get dozens of hits for various pages in the Magic Cafe forum. I just did that search now and got a SINGLE hit and it was for the word "Chinese", not for "Chinese Sticks".

I am quite confident the word "Chinese" appears hundreds of times in this forum. So, a single hit?!

Clearly, SOMETHING has changed (whether it was intentional or not) with how Google is crawling the site. I guess I'll try a different search engine.

Mark

Yes, search engine makes a huge difference!!

Google's results:



Bing's results:



Obviously, I'll be using Bing from now on.

Mark