seo

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Discuss features as they are added to the new version. Give us your feedback. Don't post bug reports, feature requests, support questions or suggestions here. Feature requests are closed.
Limit-Studios
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Re: seo

Post by Limit-Studios »

you could have:

forum4/topic15768/post131288

but like others said it shouldn't have much of a difference with rankings.

phpBB2 had problems with search engines but that was because of the session id which was given to the search bot which was different everytime. Now in phpBB3 bots are handled differently making addresses like the above not as important now.

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smithy_dll
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Re: seo

Post by smithy_dll »

Limit-Studios wrote: you could have:

forum4/topic15768/post131288

but like others said it shouldn't have much of a difference with rankings.

phpBB2 had problems with search engines but that was because of the session id which was given to the search bot which was different everytime. Now in phpBB3 bots are handled differently making addresses like the above not as important now.

Which leads us back to where I last posted. It's only the SID which has stagnated phpBB with spiders. phpBB indexes very well when you remove the SID from URLs for them.

Search engines fully support viewtopic.php?t=100 style URLs, and are very clear and concise for humans as well. However they can get tricked up by viewtopic?p=1000, but how do you intend to fix that?
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code reader
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Re: seo

Post by code reader »

there is one other small issue with se, specifically google:
if you allow guest posting (as i do), google sees and follows the "quote" button, and for some inexplicable reason, it indexes the "posting.php" with the quote before it indexes the message itself.
the result is that in google, all (at least most) of the searches leading to your site will end up with the "posting with quote" page, rather than the viewtopic page. (and, btw, in the acp, when viewing users activity, the bots often show as "posting message". this is not critical, just confusing)
the remedy is either add "nofollow" to the viewtopic page, or "noindex, nofollow" to the posting page.
unfortunately, adding rel=nofollow to the quote button will not solve the issue, because (according to google), the "rel='nofollow'" to an anchor does not really mean no-follow, it means no-increase-rating.

on a side: one way to discourage spammers is to add the "rel='nofollow' to all user-added urls, including the "user home page".
if this is to have any effect, it can't be done in a mod: the spammers will not know whether or not you installed that mod, so they will spam you anyway. the only way to take advantage of the rel='nofollow' is to use it in the core product. i think you should.

see: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/ ... -spam.html" target="_blank

Graham
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Re: seo

Post by Graham »

And this is the reason in 3.0 that permissions for search bots can be defined separately from those for guests. Which also means you can have guest accessible forums which are not accessible to search engines if you wish
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code reader
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Re: seo

Post by code reader »

Graham wrote: And this is the reason in 3.0 that permissions for search bots can be defined separately from those for guests. Which also means you can have guest accessible forums which are not accessible to search engines if you wish
but i do want the guests posts to be indexed on search engines.
what i dont want is to have the se index the "posting" page, which happens now in phpbb 2.0 when you have guest posting.
the problem is that the search engines follow the "quote" link.
in other words, i want the viewtopic page to be indexed, but not followed, or the posting page to be non-indexed and nofollow.
i dont want to lose the indexing of the posts themselves, as i think what your suggestion would ammount to.

NeoThermic
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Re: seo

Post by NeoThermic »

code reader wrote:
Graham wrote: And this is the reason in 3.0 that permissions for search bots can be defined separately from those for guests. Which also means you can have guest accessible forums which are not accessible to search engines if you wish
but i do want the guests posts to be indexed on search engines.
what i dont want is to have the se index the "posting" page, which happens now in phpbb 2.0 when you have guest posting.
the problem is that the search engines follow the "quote" link.
in other words, i want the viewtopic page to be indexed, but not followed, or the posting page to be non-indexed and nofollow.
i dont want to lose the indexing of the posts themselves, as i think what your suggestion would ammount to.

That still isn't a problem, as you're able to set explicit permissions to groups, so just deny them the ability to post, and the only thing they will ever index is a page that has something like 'You do not have the permissions required to post' or similar.

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Kail
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Re: seo

Post by Kail »

Well I personally love the way Drupal does this with clean URLs and Apache rewrite rules. Maybe something worth looking into?
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markus_petrux
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Re: seo

Post by markus_petrux »

However, drupal.org itself still uses links with numbers for most of their nodes, in the form of drupal.org/node/nnnnn. Only when a node is somehow important they create a path alias, but it is not for easy the task of SEs, the purpose is to provide human friendly URLs.

Kail
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Re: seo

Post by Kail »

Regardless, the sort of URLs Drupal produces are much SE friendlier than the URLs phpBB has, they're easier to type too.
Clean readable URL aliases would be a great idea for categories and forums, making it easier for people to direct others, being able to refer to a word instead of a primary key in a database table.
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kulinar
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Re: seo

Post by kulinar »

code reader wrote: unfortunately, adding rel=nofollow to the quote button will not solve the issue, because (according to google), the "rel='nofollow'" to an anchor does not really mean no-follow, it means no-increase-rating.
That is not true. I applied rel="nofollow" to posting and quote buttons and from 3830 indexed pages I have only 33 with posting in URL (all of them indexed before adding nofollow attribute).

The thing that boders me is that Google "likes" too much profile pages. I have restricted them to registered users only, added nofollow, disallowed in robots,txt and still I see bots visiting this pages. When I started my board, the first indexed pages were index.php and the profiles of my users.

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