phpBB Search Engine Optimization - Sessions, static ( SEO )

Where's the .htaccess
I can't find .htaccess anywhere, can I make one? Please post instructions some instructions for people who don't have an .htaccess and where to put it.

Thank you.

Establishing your site as a brand.

For example, as I type this the title window only says "Post a reply" instead of "Able2Know.com - Post a reply".

By eliminating the site name from the title SEO is improved drastically, however you lose a bit of the branding for your site name.



It creates a link on the viewtopic page to a search of the member's posts.

On this forum the member name is linked to said search.

Re: Where's the .htaccess


Yes you can make one. As to where to put it just put it where it says in the instructions: in the root folder of your forum.

Making it is easy, just make a text file named .htaccess

Hmmm.. yeah thanks I figured it out but my host makes it disapear Thank you

After just adding the rewrite URL stuff, this happens when I click a forum as a guest:



Pease help!!

Also, I replaced it with my backup files to get rid of it and go back to my old way, and that still comes up!

It's more likely that whatever client you are using to view your files (e.g. an FTP app) is not displaying hidden files.

Some clients allow you to change a setting in order to view them.

MCG321,

See here:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=44896

That thread contains all the problems and solutions I have seen users encounter with the mod_rewrite portion of the mod.

Of course, even after removing the mod code if you still try to access a spoofed URL you will get said error.

If you have restored your backups refresh the forum index (after clearing your cache) and try again.

If you still have problems then they are either unrelated to this mod or you have not succeeded in restoring a backup of files prior to the addition of the mod.

That solved my problems - the .htaccess wasn't in the forum's directory. Thanks a lot for your help, and for all of the hard work you've contributed.

I'm appalled at how rude that one user is in the help thread, and I hope you know that for every jackass like that, thousands of people appreciate your hard work. Thanks again.

Few Questions on phpBB Mod.
Hi Craven,
I have added both your mods (SEO 2.0.0 and Static URL 1.0.0) to my phpBB (latest version 2.0.14) and it seems to be working fine. (It is great to get proper page titles for each post now!)
So thankyou very much for your work.

A few questions though (I am into philosophy, like to understand why things are the way they are, how they work!). I have spent two full days reading and experimenting, using several different link checkers (before and after mod) that obey robots.txt to confirm changes. So I have tried to be thorough and not waste your time with idle questions (but I am still ignorant of a lot!!)

1. You write;

"NOTE: This means you can't enable guest posting to your forums. It won't hamper guests in any way other than disallowing them to post. phpBB recently improved security with their session IDs so this code strikes a perfect balance between session ID integrity and search engine spidering."

On my forum people who are not logged in can still post (this is how I set it in admin) so I don't understand above comment. This is trivial, I am just curious!?

2. You write, re Static URLs;

"The reason it's only for guests is to prevent logged in users who don't use cookies from losing their sessions."

Does anyone know roughly what percent of people don't use cookies on internet?
The reason I ask is that I am concerned about this coding to give different URLs (static) to non logged in users (includes spiders) Vs logged in users (dynamic URLS).
Further, when you are in a forum, for the same post you have two different addresses, depending on whether you click text link of post title (on left) Vs clicking last post date link (on right).

For example, if not logged in then top post in my forum has URL of;
forum/about45.html (link on left to page title)
and also;
forum/post-74.html (time / date link on right to last post)

Yet both these links go to same page (last post may take you to lower anchor heading on same page if there are several replies).
So I wonder why these are different URLs.

To further confuse things, if you are logged in then you will also get two different links to same page, but they are dynamic URLs and thus different to the two above.

So you have four different URLs that correspond to the same page content. Now I realise that Google will only see one of these (non logged in static URL of type about.html, as noted below you use robots.txt to block other type, post-*.html).

However, if someone makes an external link from another website to this post, there is a fair chance they will login to page and copy URL, and thus link to a dynamic URL that Google does not spider. I assume that this is a wasted inbound link (and is confusing).

Finally, after doing mod, I actually found that there were another three static URL links to this same page of the type;
forum/post-x.html (assume these are all latest post links)
so I actually have five different URL addresses that are static that go to same page content, and it is possible that people may make links to these pages when they are useless to Google as they are blocked.

Any thoughts on this, and in particular why the latest post URL is of the type;
post-x.html
and the actual post heading link is of the type;
aboutx.html (which i take to be the 'real' page!)
when they are the same page content.

3. My aim is to try and only allow Google to spider posts / content. To better achieve this (I hope) I have added the following to my robots.txt file (from search.php down);

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow: /forum/post-*.html$
Disallow: /forum/updates-topic.html*$
Disallow: /forum/stop-updates-topic.html*$
Disallow: /forum/ptopic*.html$
Disallow: /forum/ntopic*.html$
Disallow: /forum/search.php
Disallow: /forum/faq.php
Disallow: /forum/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forum/groupcp.php
Disallow: /forum/login.php
Disallow: /forum/posting.php
Disallow: /forum/profile.php
Disallow: /forum/privmsg.php
Disallow: /forum/modcp.php
Disallow: /forum/post-
Disallow: /forum/mark-forum

i) Do you see any problems with this (my link checker seems to show that it works in blocking these files)?
ii) Are there any other files that are extraneous and can be blocked?
iii) Why do you put $ at end, what does that do?
iv) From my link checking I did not notice that your code made any difference to files accessed by spider / link checker. I assume that the * means one or more characters (or just one?). I read that the use of * is not standard robots.txt code, but that Google does read it OK. So I had to add;
Disallow: /forum/post-
to block those files as your;
Disallow: /forum/post-*.html$
did not seem to work for my link / spider checker.

5. Finally, I realise that I had to modify your mods to hard code title for my forum (in lang-main.php). Are there any other changes that I should have done to your mods that relate to making it site specific. And related to this, if I want to change default URL name from;
pagex.html
to my own name, e.g.
science-articlex.html
where do i do this?

Sorry for such long email. I hope that it helps others as well as me!
All the best,
Geoff Haselhurst

PS - I know that you don't like people posting links - but it may be helpful to know where my forum is (and brackets seem to make it non active). See;
(http://www.physics-philosophy-metaphysics.com/forum/index.php)

Re: Few Questions on phpBB Mod.


They can still post if they accept cookies. Those who don't may have problems.



I saw that you got some general info on that already, but do note that you are barking up the wrong tree.

How many users on the net who generally reject cookies is not the issue, but rather those who do not elect to set the cookie when logging in.

Netwide stats on browser settings won't reflect on this at all.




One is a link to the topic, the others are links to individual posts. It would make more sense to have those turn up as links to the topic with subsequent links to bookmarks on the page where the post is.

It sounds like an easy change until you note that pagination will have to be addressed.

Ultimately, it's easier to just robot.txt exclude the post urls.




It's not wasted, but it does split up the IBLs. Not a huge deal but yes, not optimal.




aboutx = topic
post-x = post

Ultimately, I will make the static url mod work for logged in users as well, but I am waiting for phpbb 3.0.0 to do so as some urls may change.




The robots.txt should really not have any wildcards etc. How to deal with them is outlined here:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1134609#1134609

(BTW, that's a post url, and is a good example of why the post urls are useful)



You should remove it. It's a regex symbol and some spiders were indicating that they would support wildcards and the like. But that never took off so you should use the methods I outline in the post I link to above.



I'm not sure whether even google supports the wildcard anymore. But you got the idea on how to deal with it.



You should do this in the files that are modified in the static url mod.

An easy way to do this would be to do a find/replace on strings (text bits) that you know are unique to the files.

Make sure that the changes are duplicated in both the php and .htaccess files and you are all set.

Thanks for detailed reply
Hi Craven,

Thanks you very much for your detailed reply. And I am glad that you have confirmed what my experimenting showed with respect to robots.txt code.

I am going to think about the above more, as I experiment with phpBB and better understand it. Hopefully in time I might be able to add a few ideas on ways to better optimise this software (which i find an interesting challenge).

Thanks again for the great help, I owe you a favour!
Cheers,
Geoff Haselhurst

Don't you have any means of preventing duplicate content by converting this:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132-0-asc-0.html

into this:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132.html

And also this:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/a2k-about36-0-0.html

into this:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/ask-about36.html

With a modification in the page_header.php and .htaccess? I think that would be great!

those with global variable turned off
Hello all,

First of all, I wanted to say thanks to the author of the mod, and those who helped out in this forums. I wasn't paying attention to this until a customer ask me about it.

Some of us might have problem with the mod, besides the reasons have been mentioned on this forums, there is one that is not, and some of us might have it - it is about global variable. Since having this feature turned on can be a risk to your site, and some host has turn that off. Therefore, the mod rewrite will not work for you if your site have the global variable turned off.

What you need to do for the mod write is to add few variable to some functions as the following: ( i also suggest you to do this mod first before apply the mod for Able2Know.com Search Engine Optimization 2.0.0 --> you will see if it works or not. if it does, apply the changes for other files for the SEO 2.0.0)

after you have followed the author's intructions to change:

1- for the file: includes/page_header.php
--> find: function replace_for_mod_rewrite(&$s){
--> add right after that: global $userdata, $dbg_starttime;

2- for the file: includes/functions.php
--> find: function redirect($url)
{
global $db, $board_config;

--> change it to:
function redirect($url)
{
global $db, $board_config, $userdata;



----
you're done! i am currently use it for my latest version 2.0.14 phpbb with global variable turned off, and it works super!!!

Thanks again!

It would be better done at the point at which those urls are first generated. I'll eventually have a look at it but if anyone else gets to it first please post the code.

Hi,

First thanks for the great mod! I'm using it now a few moths and it work great! But i have to move my forum to a subdirectory. After moveing my forum to the subdirectory i have problems whit the static urls.

I have follow the mod again to try to fix everything only i think the problem is that my forum now is located in a subdirtory. I have to try to find a answer on this forum but i cant find it.

My .htaccess file:


Is there some who can tell me how i can use this mod in a subdirectory ? Or where i can find a howto to let this work whit a forum in a subdirectory ?

Greets Wouter
P.S. sorry for my bad english its not my mother language

Hello

the mod is good for 2.0.14 phpbb ?


@Craven> What do you think to start a new topic possibly updating
this new topic to phpbb 2.0.14 ? I think only YOU could resume
relevant points on 118 topic pages !

Wouter,

The mod works perfectly as is in a sub directory. Just follow the instructions (i.e. you likely forgot to move the rewrite rules from your .htaccess file in root to one in the sub).

graziano,

This mod works for phpbb 2.0.14. And I can summarize the entire thread here:

"Follow the mod instructions accurately and you won't have that problem."

the mod will not work if global variable is turned off in php.ini,
but most hosting services have them on due to some old scripts users are still using.

when I click on DOWLOAD NOW (first topic page) I receive this


Oops, we had the following problem:
Unknown File requested.