Search-engine friendly forums

After thinking about this for a while I've concluded this. You're never going to be able to get a search engine to spider an entire message board. Websites are only spidered for a set amount of time before the search engine moves onto the next site. So it's only going to catch a few posts.

Your best bet for getting posts to show up on the search engines is to have featured posts that show up on the main page. So whatever posts are featured when your board is spidered will end up in the search engines. I've noticed that A2K does this and has a lot of posts on the search engines.

Totally disagree... as far as I've seen google indexes everything when it's setup right. I guarantee that if you go to the older posts on this forum that actually have a pagerank, and search google for them you'll find them. Which leaves me with this question... Craven, how'd you go about setting up this forum with the renamed url for the forum and posts?

It's completely possible to have each and every post from your board indexed in Google. It's a matter of SEO precision and the ranking of your site.

Dabuek,

I'll release the mod when I have time.

I've seen here at A2Kwhere posts here end up in a google search within hours.

http://www.able2know.com/forums/about21865.html <-- BEAUTIFUL. (This threads URL)
I know it's possible, but I've yet to have seen any URL that contains a question mark receive any pagerank value from google... ever.

Craven, take your time, just know that your fan club is waiting. I refuse to even put up my forum until I can get your code for renaming threads, forums, etc. on it! *grins*

If you're waiting for the renaming of threads, as in dynamic to html, that's mod rewrite which you can do now.

It didn't seem to work well with the SEO mod for some reason. When I applied mod_rewrite with the SEO mod on it screwed things up.

that's odd, mine worked fine. There are two versions of the rewrite code, could that be it?

So you have SEO mod, and mod_rewrite installed on yours? Could you, by any chance, just email me your includes/page_header.php, and includes/page_tail.php files? I'd love you forever. (seriously, you'd have a friend... for life.)

-- Dabuek
my email is dpatrick at meuccicues dot com

I sent the email, but what was different for the two version of the rewrite mod wasn't the php but the lines that went into htaccess, they have two different versions for that.

Thanks a million... Know where I can find the most recent version of .htaccess?
And where do you put the .htaccess file... in the forum directory, or in the rootweb of the website? The instructions weren't very clear. :-)

Edit: I threw the files in... I'm using the .htaccess provided on their forums (http://mods.best-dev.com/ftopic635.php, and still getting some kind of whacked out error... check it out: )Edit (Moderator): Do not post your site and try clicking on the only forum on the page. What is the deal? "No input file specified"?

you should remove the links as they aren't allowed as per the admins here.

I saw it, it looks like half of the mod is working. Did you follow the instructions to modify phpbb? Follow those perfectly and remember my page header and tail might be different because of my mods, but if you follow the phpbb mod instructions that should be fine. I sent you my htaccess file so you can copy the rewrite rules, copy only that not the whole file then.

oops, sorry, you put the htaccess in the folder where the forum is located.

I didn't end up using your whole file... I actually did just go through the readme and copy, and replace the stuff it told me to. I'll take a stab at the .htaccess file you emailed me and see if it makes any difference.

let me know when it's up and if you're having problems

you should be able to tell the mod rewrite lines, including the on switch, it's all just copy and paste should be any problems