Can anyone give me any good advice on the best way to start to optimise a phpbb forum. I have already started a bit by changing the session and title of the pages. Does anyone think that it is worth while reading up on the mod rewrite?
I was going to post the same question here. I'm going to launch a new forum in my country and would really appreciate any good help in optimizing it. You can view it here http://www.forumwebmaster.it/forum Thanks in advance to all those who will help
i think the main thing is removing session ids, so spider can index your forum without problems, the rest is basicly the same as you would seo a normal site. open up the template file(S) and give the links titles etc, name your forums properly, and give a good (keyword based) description.
There is a mod available that will create a "lite" version of your phpbb which uses static URLs. It makes your board SEO friendly. The best part is that it's an upload of a couple of files and you're done. I have the link to download this mod, but I don't know if posting it would be in violation of any rules, so you can PM me if you need it.
I currently have a client positioned at # 5 on google so I feel I have some clout in this area. ... actually I just like the bragging rights. Anyway to answer your question I would suggest that you use keywords in the topic threads for best results when you start a new forum. This will keep the repetition throughout the forum without looking "optimized"! As for rewrites etc. not a clue but you should keep outgoing links to the minimum. Can someone explain the rewrites to me? Do they work? I don't have a great deal of building knowledge just a strategic mind for SEO & SEM. Thomas J.
Use able2know's seo (but not his mod re-write) - this will remove sessions for guests and will reduce pagerank drain caused by a ton of links on the index page. Also use webmedic's mod re-write that'll set you up with static html pages, dynamic meta tags, and keywords in your html page titles. Thats the best you can do right now. you can see an example of what I've done on www.moddedmustangs.com/forums/ - many of the typical things you're used to is not seen by guests (or spiders for that matter). You get not session id's, can't see who's online, avatars, sigs, etc. the mod re-write commands simply show a different page title, but the old php? page titles still work too of course. I prefer this way much more than having a search engine only bland template. But, its not as easy and of course your server has to allow mod rewrite
I'm # 2 currently (after #1 swiped some of my keywords ) in a playing field of "about 17,500,000 for psychology forum": http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...005-35,GGLG:en&q=psychology+forum&btnG=Search I don't use mod_rewrite. I think it's overkill. Unnecessary. And it can create some problems of its own. I do use the Able2Know MOD without the mod_rewrite feature. This optimizes things like title, etc. The forum itself has about 47,100 indexed (this number fluctuates somewhat but that's the number this morning). My web stats tell me that the individual threads are delivering traffic for specific topic searches related to the thread contents.
Strangely, I don't see anything there that credits the author for the MOD. I also see that on a random page selected with a post date of November 2004 the page is PR0. How does mod-rewrite benefit you? I have never, repeat never seen any evidence that is is necessary or provides any significant benefit.
^^ I was going to mention something about distributing someone elses work as well. I dloaded the file and it does have a credit to Craven in the file, but I doubt he'd want it distributed elsewhere. As far as the html page url's... we'll certainly I've seen many phpbb boards have thousands of indexed pages. The session removal is definately important, keeping page rank down is important, and I use the mod-rewrite MAILY for the keyword URL's which is important (which you can't get from A2K).
My comment was just to say I was surprised that the download page didn't mention the author's name...
Get the Search Engine Optimization mod, you can find it at phpbbhacks. It creates an archive version of your forums. The best part is no modding required, just upload and it's good to go. http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/2320
As a suggestion, I understand phpBB has a mod which allows your articles to be syndicated as RSS. This is a must, get your content out there, it's a free ever growing link back to the board. RSS is now being spidered and linked in itself, plus it's a great way to extract the contents of the board onto standalone pages which are much easier to optimise for Searches.
While I don't proclaim to understand the mod re-write theory completely. I am inclined to trust "Minstrel" when he suggests it being totally unnecessary to the task of optimizing. Further, I agree that the re-write is making the situation much more complex than is really required for optimization purposes anyway. Thanks by the way "Minstrel" for the insight you provided..... Thomas J.
I think everyone has forgotten the entire premise the internet was founded upon. The sharing of information. So Mvaldosta and others why would someone not want their work distributed provided they are given appropriate credit? I see nothing objectionable about it. I for one would be flattered by the thought and much more so by the act. Thomas J.
Theirs nothing on his website indicating credits to the author. Thats all we were getting at. I would think at least a link to the authors site would be the least he could do. At first glance I didnt think he credited the author at all, until I saw the line in one of the mod files I downloaded. Theirs so much piracy of information in the SEO field, and so little willingness to link back to a contributer. And as for phpbb SEO again, my forum pages have dynamic meta keywords and keywords in the page title. Do you to believe thats unecessary?
Yeah I removed the mod-rewrite mod as well. I just came up with a new mod for PHPBB for one of my new forums that I am going to migrate over to others. Lets me use the forum description for the meta description and I added a keywords field for each forum as well. Perhaps not that great for SEO but useful for things like adsense. By the way when I removed the mod-rewrite from two of my sites, google indexing skyrocketed on one of them. I think the mod-rewrite portion of that is worse than not doing it, in my experience.