Sitemap for forums?

I've read that forums are sometimes hard for google and other search engines to crawl. Would adding a sitemap for a forum help combat this problem? If so, does anyone know a good way to generate a sitemap for a phpbb forum?

I use a wordpress plugin for my blog, so I dunno what would be good for a forum.

 

What forum software do you use?

It may help some. Getting static type links with mod_rewrite mods and some links to internal pages will help a lot too.

Good luck...

 

I use phpbb. I think I'll try that static link thing. It worked well with my blog (instead of having a link like ?p=1012). I installed a mod for phpbb that I found for the sitemap thing. Just wondering if anyone found success with it. Thanks!

 

But why must there be a specific software for forums? Use any Sitemap generator to create feeds in XML for Google. They will all create it the same way, by crawling your website. Use this until you get around 750 posts:
http://www.sitemaps.blocklayer.com/
and register with Google Sitemaps at:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

The Google Sitemap shows the Page Rank of your websites, which is really helpful!

 

I installed a program in my forum that (I think) updates the sitemap dynamically. So I don't have to mess with generating one whenever the content changes. At least I don't think I do...

 

That would cover your forums, but not the rest of the site. Use an automated sitemap service like AutoMapIt to do all the work for you and to get you rentire site on the sitemap.

Clean URLs are very helpful, but the PHPSESSID will creep up on phpBB if cookies are not enabled.... and search spiders don't support cookies. If the following line of code works on your server configuration it will help to eliminate passing the PHPSESSID variable in the URL...

phpbb/common.php

at the bottom of the file....

ini_set("session.use_only_cookies","1");
?>

This should ensure that the spiders don't get the PHPSESSID in the URL when they visit your forums.

 

Hi!

Some of the sitemap tools (e.g. GSiteCrawler and phpSitemapNG) can exclude session ids automatically. I would suggest to see if there is a plugin for phpBB - if not than you should use a crawler-based sitemap tool (like the two mentioned above).
If somebody of you is familiar with phpBB we could create an input plugin for phpSitemapNG.

Best regards,
Tobias

 

if thats all it took im gonna be so pissed cus i had to isntall some long mod to disable sessions n it messed up the way my users login, sometimes ittakes 3-4 times til u can actually login :////