PHPBB vs VB - with regard to SE indexing

[dcristo]

Google really seems to be taking a disliking to phpbb forums, not indexing very many pages.

Something which I really like about VB is the archiver feature.

Has anyone recently converted from PHPBB to VB and experienced a large increase in indexed pages in Google?

[Digilover]

nops does vb have search engine detector

[dcristo]

nops does vb have search engine detector

huh :confused:

[Deal svengali]

If you set them both up with a mod rewrite and functions to strip session IDs and to convert the URL to SE friendly urls. They both function the same.

[Claymation]

Doing as stated above, I have had much success with SERPS on a phpBB site.

[mightyb]

I had all my pages indexed when i was on phpbb 40K+

After switching to VB i now only have around 14K indexed pages however the traffic from SEs went up.

[dcristo]

I had all my pages indexed when i was on phpbb 40K+

After switching to VB i now only have around 14K indexed pages however the traffic from SEs went up.

How well indexed was it with phpBB though? Was it just alot of pages cached with no title and description?

[mdvaldosta]

You've got to do things on phpbb like remove all the places where bots can find duplicate URL's to the same content - view next topic, the title's that are links within viewtopic which are different than the url in viewforum. Also, unlinking the member id's etc. and adding h1 tags to the page titles, etc. are all very helpful.

I had a box stock phpbb install on www.offtopicz.com (but with SIDS removed) and after 8 months had 4 pages indexed in google. It was running smartor's portal. After some major SEO way above what the abletoknow mod offers and putting nofollows on all the unimportant pages and url's the site is now at 16,800 pages indexed 3 months later.

[dcristo]

You've got to do things on phpbb like remove all the places where bots can find duplicate URL's to the same content - view next topic, the title's that are links within viewtopic which are different than the url in viewforum. Also, unlinking the member id's etc. and adding h1 tags to the page titles, etc. are all very helpful.

I had a box stock phpbb install on www.offtopicz.com and after 8 months had 4 pages indexed in google. It was running smartor's portal. After some major SEO way above what the abletoknow mod offers and putting nofollows on all the unimportant pages and url's the site is now at 16,800 pages indexed 3 months later.

Thanks for sharing your ideas.

With regard to the unlinking member id idea, do you mean just disallowing it in the robots.txt file, or completely removing the link in the source code?

Now you have me thinking the sudden decrease in pages could be attributed to linking out to bad neighbourhoods, with all the forum member spam registrations.

[mdvaldosta]

put a nofollow tag on your memberlist.php and disallow it in robots.txt. Same thing for the register, login, faq, etc. links in your navigation. For the members, I'm referring to unlinking the member names from their profile. Why pass pagerank to member's profiles when they don't provide content? Get all your pagerank and links pointed to content pages.

Look at offtopicz.com for your example. You can do most of the work in the tpl files. If you "really" want to keep the site looking like you have it now you can at least put nofollow tags on the links. Just open the tpl and ctrl F to find your url strings and put the link condoms on all the stuff you don't want.