I use the A2K mod on my rugby forum, and quickly Google took 6,000 pages. Last week Google updated its Directory with DMOZ data, and googlebots attacked my forum with a vengence. I now have some 18,000 or so pages indexed, although as you would expect with that volume, many are PIPS, (partially indexed), but this is to be expected during such a massive increase. I would expect that number to drop back a little though before forging ahead again. One thing I didn't do though with the A2k mod was to remove the signature links from the spiders. I chose this, as I honestly feel that it can help the search engines to understand better which neighbourhood to place your site in (although with that many pages, sections will be in a few neighbourhoods I would imagine. The page rank funnelling/protection parts, I didn't really bother with as I don't give a rats fart about page rank
OWG, Yeah as I have used the A2K mod several times now, I have basically morphed it into my own process where I still use parts of the A2K mod, but omit a lot of them. Inlcuded are the pagerank stuff. I actually think the internal links help with spidering and other issues. I too don't give a flip about page rank draining. I just tried something with a phpbb sitemap mod that I will report back here and see. I was using two different google sitemap mods on two different sites and one was not working well and the other has been absolute gangbusters. I just switched the other site over this morning. I am going to wait and see if it has a dramatic increase as well.. I suspect it will... but will let everyone know.
Great stuff, it will be good to see what the outcome is, although I have to admit to being VERY sad at choosing phpbb due to the constant updates and hack attempts.
Yeah... the hack attempts are annoying and with the number of mods I do, updating is not fun..... One of my sites has been under a santy attack for like the last 5 days... It is silly. (It is not actually doing anything but it is just annoying my log file)
Are you using the latest version on that site, aeiouy? If so, PM me for the fix... I don't want to help the damn kiddie scripters by posting it publicly.