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.
mavoric
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seo

Post by mavoric »

Search engine optimisation, sorry but this is a biggy, the ability for search engines to search the forums properly, either by creating html pages, or by folders, this would be good :P

Sorry if its already been mentioned
Last edited by SamG on Fri Sep 17, 2004 9:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: clarify the topic title

SamG
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Re: so

Post by SamG »

phpBB 2.2 offers "search engine friendliness."

New suggestions (suggestions not already made) go in the suggestion tracker, not the forums (see the forum index for a redirect). Suggestions are closed for phpBB 2.2, but new suggestions will be considered for the next major release.
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sparkster
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Re: seo

Post by sparkster »

If you look at the who's online part and notice how much Googlebot is here you'd know that this version is seo-friendly. Static-looking URLs aren't all thats involved in making a site spiderable and getting good SERPS, not even close.

Toe
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Re: seo

Post by Toe »

Since we're on the topic, there's something I've been meaning to bring up about 2.2's bot handling. Specificly, ?p= in URLs. On a normal board view, there's a lot of links to individual posts, most of them via the little page icons. The problem is that it's creating ~15 new, distinct URLs for what's really just one page. But of course, a web crawler doesn't know that, and treats it as 15 different pages, and downloads each of them. And of course, there's still the regular ?t= URLs on top of that. That would could a pretty big bandwidth waster that I don't think many webmasters would appreciate.

Glancing at this board through a useragent simulator, it doesn't appear that there is currently any sort of handling of this in place. Is anything planned?

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psoTFX
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Re: seo

Post by psoTFX »

No, not at this late stage.

BioALIEN
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Re: seo

Post by BioALIEN »

After searching the forum for Search Engine Optimisation, this is the only thread remotly discussing this subject.

I wanted to bring it back to everyone's attention. Indeed as SamG pointed out, both Google Bot and MSN Bot are frequent visitors to area51. However, im interested in finding out how this pans out in terms of crawling and indexing phpbb3 boards once the BETA/RC is out in response to Toe's comments.

At this stage im just wondering what kind of plans the DEVs have in place regarding the future of phpBB's SEO. Some rival boards ship with an ARCHIVE zone that seems to demonstrate successful implementation for SEO. Im personally not in favour of this method but if it gets the bots on your side then why not :roll:
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kjcdude
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Re: seo

Post by kjcdude »

PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD include SEO in phpbb 3.

it needs to be coded into the core.

Wedmedic has created a fantastic SEO that does what it needs to do, but it can be troublesome at times since it isnt part of the core to phpbb

http://theocsucks.com/the-oc-vt194.html" target="_blank
thats an seo url
http://theocsucks.com/viewtopic.php?t=194" target="_blank
thats a phpbb url
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3At ... 2the+oc%22" target="_blank

the SEO url is a billion times better because it has the topic title in it, is html and without clicking on it, you can tell what the topic is about

when you google this site
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:are ... com/phpBB/" target="_blank
you will get half the ranking you would get if you had a seo with the topic title in the url
a url like this - /viewtopic.php?f=3&t=20536&start=20
looks much better to a human and bots if it's like this
/php-Folk-vt20536.html

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smithy_dll
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Re: seo

Post by smithy_dll »

It's already in phpBB3, it only works if IP and useragent is matched. This stops all the people running around like fools with googlebot in their useragent from being logged in as googlebot and doing foolish things.
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smithy_dll
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Re: seo

Post by smithy_dll »

and to answer this question
In google those two URL's rank exactlythe same. That kind of SEO is now defunct. The only benefit is for human consumption, and I think it's easier for humans to understand ?t=topicID than a goobly gook .html super SEOified URL. Of course if your URL is super long you'd think about rewriting it to something shorter, but shorter isn't always better.
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hagrin
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Re: seo

Post by hagrin »

Davidls wrote: and to answer this question
In google those two URL's rank exactlythe same. That kind of SEO is now defunct. The only benefit is for human consumption, and I think it's easier for humans to understand ?t=topicID than a goobly gook .html super SEOified URL. Of course if your URL is super long you'd think about rewriting it to something shorter, but shorter isn't always better.
That's only half right. Problem is, it's also half wrong.

Yes, it is true that Google and the other major search engines now handle querystrings extremely well. So, as long as they are static querystrings AFTER indexing (i.e. not like a SID which would change every time a guest would login), then you're good to go.

However, Matt Cutts, Google search engine guru, has already stated the importance of keyword placement in the URL and the unimportance of putting the date in the URL as its unnecessary (translation - remove the garbage to improve keyword density).

The answer is using .htaccess to dynamically create the SEO friendly links while not having to maintain a billion folders and directories.
http://www.hagrin.com" target="_blank

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