phpBB Search Engine Optimization - Sessions, static ( SEO )

since the googlebot spiders the threads... cant i post a ton of keywords? or would google be able to pick up on this and skip that post?

this would be for a relatively new board that, unlike this board, doesn't have a TON of posts on it for google to spider in the first place.

It might get flagged for search engine spam.

Idea for additional mod
BTW - thanks again for the SEO mod - it's working a treat.

I've been hearing a lot about Google beginning to filter out forums from their index and was trying to think of ways to combat this. One way would be to replace any text that identifies the site as a forum by an image containing the identical info.

For example the "Powered by phpBB 2.0.6 © 2001, 2002 phpBB Group" notice at the bottom could be replaced by an image containg the same copyright info. Also the link back to phpBB could be hidden from Google spiders by containing it within a remote JS tag or something.

Craven - let me know if you're interested in this and I can fill you in on some of the details (assuming you don't already know them)

Gieckboy

I've reported a few times that Google is penalizing some phpBB pages.

I've not looked into it to determine if they are penalizing pages with dynamic URL variables or if they are specifically targeting certain forum files.

I lean toward the latter based on casual observation.

I do not think this is done through on page text, I think it is flagged through the URL.

I think they are recognizing viewtopic and viewforum as phpbb pages to penalize.

Eventually I'll address this but I'm waiting for 2.2.0 because I believe they already have some url changes.

As to the copyright putting it in an image should do the trick, they'd probably not penalize based on a backlink to phpbb.

Either way, I don't think it's on page text that is at fault.

On my site (see my profile for it if you wish) I implemented your MOD, but I also have another MOD that gives a little "Register or Login" pop-up. Will that pop-up mess up or aggravate google?

No, the popup shouldn't interfere at all. It'll just piss off visitors. .

I had a look at your code and noticed your CSS is in the header. It should be moved to an external file.

That will help both page loading time and SEO as the CSS is taking up a lot of space.

To do this, delete the huge CSS text and uncomment the external CSS line:

<!-- link rel="stylesheet" href="templates/subSilver/subSilver.css" type="text/css" -->

it looks like my site finally was picked up by google, but it picked up only a single forum name and description, and that's it. everything else appears to have been skipped.

i'm currious... does the google spider pick up a small piece at a time? meaning, does it shows up... grab something small, then leave... and that's what you get for that visit... and then it comes back again, picks up something else, and then leaves again... and then just continues to add these small bits it picks up to the google DB (or whatever you call it where they store a sites results)?

How they spider is different for each site. For example Google spends all day every day on this site. The Google freshbot has been here every day this year.

On some of my other sites they'll just visit the home page and leave.

Spidering is resource use, they limit it based on their own criteria. And the criteria has a lot to do with pagerank.

Spidering also differs in speed and intensity as determined by many factors, if your site is slow they will try to go easy on it so that they don't overload the server.

Hi,
I can't download the file:


Regards!

Thanks, I fixed the link.

I know spiders look at the url and the title. But then what? What else should I optimize wording for?

What do you mean? Most spiders look at any text on the page. Google's, for example, will spider up to 100KB of the page.

The title and URL are important but any text on the page is also something that can be optimized.

Maybe our collective question is, now that we've applied the mod, what's our next step to making our site as popular as able2know? Maybe we should start a new thread.

Well, that might not be possible.

Let me explain.

It depends on available resources.

It depends on the topic. Some topics are more popular than others.

A site with 4 people that is a theme on "your experiences in climbing mount everest" IS a popular site for that theme.

Get where I'm going? Popularity must be considered in relation to other factors like lifespan, topic, resources, etc.

Okay, so if we had exactly your topics, duplicated on our sites, what would be the next step?

Would it be possible to create a mod (or even hard for that matter), that would just mirror a popular board onto one of our sites? I'm not saying I would do it, but it seems a lot of people would..., and it seems entirely win/win.

It depends on your goals. I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Is volume the only consideration?



No need for a mod, you just need to import the database.

Other solutions would be to syndicate the content.



Why is it win/win? Mirroring a site without permission is illegal for a reason. The reason is that is is often seen as a "lose" by the mirrored site if they do not want it mirrored.

It would be win/win if one party wants instant content and the other wants benefits of syndication but then the details have to be hammered out.

Volume isn't my only consideration. I just figure it can evolve on its own once it has the people. And I can steer it where I like once it has the people. It's a it takes money to make money thing... I just want a busy site, and I think that takes a busy site, or really slow growth, or some kind of fad.

Ok, I get what you mean. It'd be a way of "jumpstarting" the party.

Since nobody likes an empty one it can be hard to start.

You need to have a handful of people who are willing to start the party and keep it going till the guests arrive or you need enough initial exposure to kick it off with a bang.

JKeats,

I finally got around to testing this code you posted. It has a number of errors that I've corrected and have already implemented here on A2K.

I'd like to include it in the mod but would like to credit the author for the original work as well as send him/her the corrections I made.

If you know anything about the author of that snippent can you PM me?

Would adding recent topics to the meta tags have any positive affect?
I just added the top 5 of my car charts to the meta tags with succes (some probs with spacing) and the recent topics should be similair to add.

Grtz