I have very bad experience with phpbb and google... gettign a decent page rank is extremely difficult and as there is session id and stuff , i think it doesnt index it very well i have no idea how to maximize such a forum with google ? please help me out
thanks so much Michael, i will ask some tech guy friend of mine to implement it on our forum.. if i will give it a try , everything will just stop working
I just remove the session IDs which takes a minute and then install a google site map mod. In a few weeks time 90% of your whole forum will be spidered. -edit- You can also have topic keywords in your urls with another mod.
Not true. Google has no problem crawling large phpbb forums, even without mod rewrite. Just make sure you remove the session ID's...
This is categorized as Beta only but looks promising (I haven't yet installed it) - note that it apparently doesn't handle subdomains: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=1639895 http://www.streetrod3.com/sitemap_mod.zip ( http://forums.streetrod3.com/sitemap2.phps )
if i already have many pages crawled with mod-rewrite, would affect somehow if i also use the google sitemap?
I use this one here: http://www.gotaxe.com/phpbb-sitemap.php It is pretty nice because it creates sub-sitemaps that keep google from bogging down with big sitemaps if you have a lot of messages. Every since I changed from another phpbb sitemap mod I have seen a marked improvement in spidering. Very simple to install too.. I know the one I listed above allows you to easily specify the suffix and prefix on the urls so it works very well with rewritten urls as well.
Hi, I have used one of the xml site map creation tools and I have noticed that only 3 pages from my board are indexed: phpbb2/ phpbb2/faq.php phpbb2/memberlist.php I guess that I need to change something, I keep reading conflicting solutions to the problem. Someone above said main problem is session ID's and thats a 30 second fix. How do implement this, excuse my ignorance but it this a phpbb setting or Apache. Many thanks in advance for your help. Rob.
Those sitemaps will (often and maybe usually) improve spidering of your site. On their own, they won't affect indexing or ranking. You don't give a URL for your forum. Have you applied the Able2Know SEO MOD or a similar SEO MOD to your forums? If not, all the sitemaps in the world are probably not going to help you.
No as yet I have not applied the MOD, I'm not sure if I am being dumb or not but I downloaded the zip but could find no instructions........ Is there a general guide to installing MODs as all I can find is two folders named includes and template, or is it a case of simply placing the contents of these two folders into the folders of the same name on my servers? Sorry for my ignorance. Rob.
To manually apply mods you need to edit the relevant files and make the changes specified in the modification. It will tell you "find" a line. You use your editor to search for the appropriate line in the file. Then it will likely tell you to "replace" it with another line. If that is the case you copy and paste the new line over the line it told you to find. Sometimes it will tell you to "add after" or "add before". In that case you add the listed line before or after the line your found. There is a mod installer program that does work with a lot of mods, but I have never used it, so I can't speak to how it works or how well it works.
As I recall, the SEO MOD is not EasyMod compatible (that's the installer aeiouy mentioned) so I think you have to do it manually. In the zip file you downloaded, find a file named "Able2Know.com Search Engine Optimization 2.0.0.txt". That contains detailed instructions on which edits to make in each file. There is, I believe, a separate instructions file for mod_rewrite (up to version 2 anyway). Don't bother with those changes - they are unnecessary and may cause you complications. All the beneficial changes are in the parts in the main text file identified above. Note: If you are using a style/theme/template in addition to or instead of subSilver (the default style), then you must make the changes for each of the additional or alternate templates you have installed. That means all the .tpl files (the .php files are core files common to all templates):