phpBB Search Engine Optimization - Sessions, static ( SEO )

i didn't even think of surrounding the block with a switch... that's a great idea!

i did that for all of the links except for login in the page header too...

thanks for the tip!

No problem!

Some questions on the mod
Hi Craven,

Some questions:

Search.php You are doing some modifications to search.php -- why not just robot exclude search.php and be done with it?

#17- Link the user post count to a search of the user's posts
The SE is presented with a list of all posts by the same user (a big file sometimes).. I have trouble understanding the value of this to SE (they already have this content in a similar format). The other idea would be to present a link page of all posts by user, so that SE can now index all posts individually. Any thoughts?

Complete elimination of offsite page rank drain
Future topic, but good to start thinking about it. I have seen some sites leave it in to get more people to post, some use a redirect to a banned directory so SE won't see it, and I have been told the best way to mask it is using javascript links. Thoughts?

Thanks in advance, and what you are doing is GREAT.

steve

Re: Some questions on the mod


I made the same changes only for continuity. Robot.text excluding the search file is fine.



In my personal experience, that particular search page is well indexed in some search engines. But if you robot exclude the search file you should skip this step.



Well, I've done all three here. I am currently running code that works.

Thing is, the redirection is hard to get working for all URLs. Some weird URLs with variables might not work.

I've used Javascript, but that was buggy and doesn't really work because the spiders see the link in the source anyway (of course a complicated script could be used to break up the link and put it back together on a click).

Right now I use a redirect in a robots.txt excluded directory but will soon go back to just plain URLs.

Page rank drain is not that big of a deal with Google's recent algos.



Thanks.

--------

SEOs, Yahoo went live with Inkitomi. Google's no longer providing Yahoo's SERPs.

Since Yahoo is about 20% of the search traffic out there anyone who's not doing well in Ink should start working on it.

Hi Craven

I am with you so far.

What about this one:


You can have SE's index at atomic level, i.e. individual posts... thoughts?

steve

The viewtopic pages already have links for each individual post. Search engines will just ignore the individual post links because it'll look like duplicate content. All the individual post links on one page of a thread ultimately go to the same page.

i changed <title>{PAGE_TITLE}</title>

to

<title>My Site Name.com</title>

in the overall_header.tpl

is that okay, or will that hurt me with respect to google.

It depends, here on this site it would hurt a lot.

That is the most important real estate on your page (in regard to SEO).

So if your site name is a heavily queried term then it is a good idea.

But you are losing all the different keywords from all the topic titles. So unless that is the only query people find your site with it's a very bad idea.

ahhh... very interesting. thanks for the info.

i thought google though pulled from the topic text too... is that not accurate? it only pulls from that page_title which would be a topic title on any particular topic?

i changed it back anyway... thanks for the heads up.

also... here's a couple other additions i made... the revisit and the description to be exact... are they, potentially, going to screw things up as well? am i missing anything that should be here with these meta tags? i ask because it's been a while now and i've still not gotten any results on google.

<meta name="revisit-after" content="5 days">
<meta name="description" content="my sites description here.">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset={S_CONTENT_ENCODING}" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
{META}
{NAV_LINKS}

It does pull from the text, but the algo's weigh the title as the most important text (outside the URL). So having the text on the page but not in the title could hurt you. Actually it's almost certain to hurt you.

The description tag is fine but the revisit tag will hurt SEO.

It's a limitation you impose on spiders, not an invitation to come back in five.

They will sometimes respect your limitations but will almost always ignore your invitations.

The frequency of their spidering is limited by their resources and they'll not pay much attention to your tag.

awesome... thank a bunch for the information. i took the revisit hack out and changed the other one back to page_title.

could someone explain to me the deal with the robots.txt file? i currently am NOT using one, and wonder if it might help out with the search engines. i'm still a little hazy though on what exactly they do for ya anyway. i know the htaccess file is for keeping people (and bots) from gettin to pages and dirs you don't want them... but don't really understand the deal with robots.txt files. should i be using one?

thanks again for the info.

robots.txt just tells the spiders what to stay out of. They are not technically forced to obey it. There might be legal reasons for them to but no technical prevention through it.

It's useful for one main purpose, to define what is and is not allowed in search engines.

It can be useful to help keep search engines focused on the pages you want them to focus on.

And that's pretty much it. For example, the posting.php page is a useless page for them to index. You can use robots.txt to keep them off of that page.

ahh... kewl deal. very nice. thanks for the explanation...

i'll go ahead and whip one up. do you need to add anything in the header or something to get it to work... or just pop it in the root and call it good?

Just put it in the root folder.

Note that subdomains need one in the root of the subdomain.

kewl deal... the subdomain isn't an issue for me... but good to know.

i'm basically going to block everything except for index, view forum, and view topic.

is this a good strategy, or are there other files i shoudl unblock?

Personally I prefer to block specific files rather than unblock specific files.

But as long as none of the pages that you want indexed are blocked you should be fine.

kewl deal... ya that's what i meant... i'll block pretty much every file except those that i mentioned.

thanks again for the info.

thought i'd share a robots.txt file... for those who want a template...

if i did something wrong here... like disallowed something that shouldn't be disallowed, or didn't add something that SHOULD be disallowed... please let me know.

otherwise... here y'all go...

what is the latest mod code?
hi, I want to implement this mod into my board. can anyone tell me where the very latest code is for this?

thanks

Please see the second post in this thread.

Welcome to A2K.