Tos, Faq, Search and Policy pages shouldnt be cached in searchengines

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Dragosvr92
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Tos, Faq, Search and Policy pages shouldnt be cached in searchengines

Post by Dragosvr92 »

Awhile ago i made a ticket which was marked as wont fix by staff without any debate/discussion.... I decided to post it here and see how others view the idea, so ill quote my message here..
These two pages should not be crawled and stored by search engines.
They are only relevant once, when the user registers and they shouldnt be cached by search engines as it is useless and affects SEO, having the same page contents thousands of times from every installed phpbb forum.

I hard about using the nofollow attribute in phpbb in the future, so these pages should make use of it.

https://www.phpbb.com/community/ucp.php?mode=privacy
https://www.phpbb.com/community/ucp.php?mode=terms
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search.php
https://www.phpbb.com/community/faq.php
Ive stated extra points in the comments of that ticket..
I personally dont see these pages relevant enough to have them in a forums search results.
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Re: Tos, Faq, Search and Policy pages shouldnt be cached in searchengines

Post by Senky »

All of the pages have big relevance to be crawled and processed by search engines. It is true, that almost all phpBB boards never change the text of the privacy policy and terms of use, but they should update it to match real usage of private data and terms to use the site. Applies to FAQ as well.
Search results crawled by the search engine robots produce even more inner link juice of the site, so why not, if it is a legal way?

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Louis7777
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Re: Tos, Faq, Search and Policy pages shouldnt be cached in searchengines

Post by Louis7777 »

Regarding the use of nofollow attribute on internal links, I recommend watching these videos by Matt Cutts (they are less than 8 minutes altogether). According to him, you shouldn't use nofollow on any internal links.

- Should I use nofollow in links to my disclaimer and privacy policy?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unEML5n5vTo

- Should I use the nofollow attribute on internal links?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SAPUx4Beh8

- Should I use rel="nofollow" on internal links to a login page?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86GHCVRReJs

- Should internal links use rel="nofollow"?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOOB_Q0MZY

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Dragosvr92
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Re: Tos, Faq, Search and Policy pages shouldnt be cached in searchengines

Post by Dragosvr92 »

All i could understand from those videos is that using no follow isnt good for anything as not following a page might affect page rank.....

Those pages are never changed by forum owners and phpbb doesnt even provide you with a way of doing so. They are meant to stay the same, unless... The user seriously has something else to put there and wants to bother digging into language files to change them.

They provide no relevance in google searches and if users do find them, they ignore them and try to look for other relevant links that might be in the bottom of the list. Also the search results bellow are only user specific and bring no relevance to anyone in search results.

https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... =egosearch
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... d=newposts
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... nreadposts
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... unanswered
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... ive_topics


All of these pages i linked are only of use for the registered user. Non-members have absolutely no use of these pages. Some are requred durring registration... Some for user features.... But they otherwise.. they are just trash that can show up instead of more relevant pages.
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Re: Tos, Faq, Search and Policy pages shouldnt be cached in searchengines

Post by Senky »

Dragosvr92 wrote:...Those pages are never changed by forum owners and phpbb doesnt even provide you with a way of doing so. They are meant to stay the same, unless... The user seriously has something else to put there and wants to bother digging into language files to change them.
Just because no one changes it, it doesn't mean, it shouldn't be changed. You can easily change the content in ucp.php language file. According to my knowledge, Privacy policy and TOS whould be accessible to user at any time. However, there is no link to it, except for registration process. Anyway, using google to find PP or TOS of a site is just the fastest way to find them. So privacy policy phpbb.com is really really important to me.
Dragosvr92 wrote:https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... =egosearch
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... d=newposts
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... nreadposts
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... unanswered
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... ive_topics


All of these pages i linked are only of use for the registered user. Non-members have absolutely no use of these pages. Some are requred durring registration... Some for user features.... But they otherwise.. they are just trash that can show up instead of more relevant pages.
I agree that this pages should have noindex in meta attributes.

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Re: Tos, Faq, Search and Policy pages shouldnt be cached in searchengines

Post by Pony99CA »

Senky wrote:
Dragosvr92 wrote:...Those pages are never changed by forum owners and phpbb doesnt even provide you with a way of doing so. They are meant to stay the same, unless... The user seriously has something else to put there and wants to bother digging into language files to change them.
Just because no one changes it, it doesn't mean, it shouldn't be changed. You can easily change the content in ucp.php language file. According to my knowledge, Privacy policy and TOS whould be accessible to user at any time. However, there is no link to it, except for registration process. Anyway, using google to find PP or TOS of a site is just the fastest way to find them. So privacy policy phpbb.com is really really important to me.
I agree that the Privacy Policy and TOS should be available on every page, probably in the footer.
Senky wrote:
Dragosvr92 wrote:https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... =egosearch
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... d=newposts
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... nreadposts
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... unanswered
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... ive_topics

All of these pages i linked are only of use for the registered user. Non-members have absolutely no use of these pages. Some are requred durring registration... Some for user features.... But they otherwise.. they are just trash that can show up instead of more relevant pages.
I agree that this pages should have noindex in meta attributes.
I disagree that guests have no use for those pages, though. Active topics, for example, can certainly be used by guests to see what's of interest on the board. Similarly, Unanswered Topics can be used by a guest to see if he can help anybody out. Even New Posts can be used by guests if an ACP option is set.

I agree that those pages probably shouldn't be indexed, but I also doubt that it hurts much.

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Re: Moving ToS and Privacy Links to the Footer

Post by Pony99CA »

Here are some more thoughts on adding Privacy and Terms links to the footer.

For the desktop style, you can just add them to the bottom where they make the most sense.

For mobile, I would move The team and Members to the menu and replace them with Privacy and Terms (or you could link to the Privacy page from the Terms page and then just add Terms of Service).

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