phpBB Search Engine Optimization - Sessions, static ( SEO )

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It will make it easier for them, they won't index the whole forum though.



It can be spidered. That doesn't hurt the spider at all.

But having your own domain will help. Search engines penalize free hosting etc because they view those sites as having less quality (since anyone can put one up without any investment).

I strongly recommend having your own domain name for reasons other than just SEO.




I recommend against submission software. First of al because some search engines (and directories) penalize you for using it (as they should since automated submissions hogs resources and causes problems.

Secondly it is usually a scam to sell the submission software or service.

Thirdly it usually sublits to a bunch of FFA type sites who really aren't going to help you and who just want your email address to send spam to you.

Submitting to directories like dmoz makes sense. Submitting to some search engines (like gigablast) makes sense (because they use it).

Submitting to the big search engines makes no sense (since they ignore it and have the form there just because people will bug them if they don't).

Google, for example, will almost always ignore submissions completely. They only index the page once it's met a certain criteria of theirs.

The best form of search engine submission is a link to your site on an indexed page. If you want to get indexed, and indexed deeply, you need people to link to your site.

May i know wht are those certain criteria ???
if not all . just give a simple idea....

Is that same for altavista ???
then how to get indexed in altavista ???

They do not immediately index sites with no backlinks.

Sites with no backlinks will often first just get the home page indexed.

Hmm, strange, after i deleted the {NAV_LINKS} in the overall_header, Google doesn't show up anymore.

Is this just coincedental or should i put it back?
Grtz

[edit]just checked in the page_header.php and seems that it's this bit:

Correct me if i'm wrong but isn't the Googlebot acting like the Mozilla browser?
If so, can we do something with the {NAV_LINKS} bit to further enhance it for the Googlebot and other search engines that act like the Mozilla browser?

hey :; cavern.. i have included my site name in the header but after the name of topic.. so that on searh for linux solved it get higher .. does that effect any thing ???

Also i have not included the word forum as suggested by u b'cause google don't like forum type of words..

Dunno, I recommended against removing it and have not been paying attention to what might result.




This is called "cloaking" and if teh search engines catch you you might be removed from their index.

Do not cloak unless you know what you are doing.

It means your pages will do better for a query on your domain name and worse on other queries. Since people who know your domain name don't need help finding you I'd recommend against it (though it helps branding).

In addition, you have your home page etc where you can catch traffic from your domain name query.



I never said not to use the word forum except when talking about renaming the viewforum.php file.

Thx for the reply.
I've put it back but if that's cloaking, why is it there?

Still need good names to change viewtopic.php and viewforum.php to though

What's cloaking is to try to serve a search engine specific data that other user agents do not get. What's there is fine and as I said all along doesn't need to be tinkered with.

As to the names for your files just think of something related to your site and use it.

Thx, i'll leave the nav_links part alone then

I asked the users on my site if they know any good altenatives for renaming the files.
Btw, it's both viewforum and viewtopic, right?
Grtz

Changed as u said..

I started changing the names of the files and everything works except this;
When posting a new message or replying it says, click here to return to the topic.
But the url still says viewtopic and viewforum.

What can be the problem?
I checked almost every file for viewtopic and viewforum but i changed all of them.
Is there something else i overlooked?

[edit]It's this line in posting.php:

I changed viewtopic to showthread (the new name of viewtopic.php), if everything works after this prob gets fixed, i'll post the results.
Grtz

Update: About 2 weeks after installing the mod, googlebot has started spidering it. It took so long probably because my site is relatively unknown right now.

Just today, it has hit me about 700 times (and there are still a few more hours left in the day) and used up almost 13MB of bandwidth. That does seem quite a bit for a forum with only 900 posts and 33 users. I really would worry about doing this on another forum I have which has almost 50,000 posts and 150 users; that could result in a lot of bandwidth consumption.

Some of the pages that are being spidered are:

/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21&highlight=
/forum/login.php?redirect=posting.php&mode=quote&p=293

Is there anyway to prevent those from being spidered without affecting posts from being spidered?

Jennifer

993ti,

The code replace you said you were going to try should work fine, let me know otherwise.

RammsteinNicCage,

It certainly can eat up bandwith. I think Google uses about 5 GB a month on this site.

There are many ways to cut down on the bandwidth but you should first employ the robots.txt file.

I will add an example robots.txt file and instructions to this mod soon.

Great, I'll be looking forward to the robots.txt example.

Jennifer

993ti,

If you had indeed replaced all instances of "viewforum" and "viewtopic" there would simply be no way for the software to be sending people to those links.

So in short, you missed something.

Try using a tool that can search and replace through a whole folder of files (like Edit Pad Lite).

Jennifer,

I will take a while to write up a decent tutorial on robots.txt and phpBB but here's an example file to start. If any help is needed in implementing it please let me know.

Ok, I put that in my robots.txt file Friday or Saturday. I just had a hit from google's mediapartner bot to my posting.php file. If I'm not mistaken, google bot will look at the robots.txt file about once a day, right? Or does mediapartner not obey robots.txt? Something else?

Jennifer

User-agent: * means all bots (but only bots that respect robots.txt will obey).

Mediabot should obey it.

But it would help if you use the correct directory name. You are using what I use "forums", while your directory is "forum".

Rename all instances of "forums" in the robots.text file to "forum" and you will at least be giving the bots the correct instructions.