Solution to Getting your PHPBB Forum Spidered - Part 1

You can get phpBB from http://www.phpbb.com/

 

vBulletin is better than phpBB. However, phpBB is free and a new better version is promised (with no timeline however). vBulletin costs $85 a year or $160 to keep the same version forever.

 

Thanks, I see it is also open source. I will download it as soon as I can.
Also has a good community it seems.

 

Yes, and it may not be $160 bucks worth better.

 

Now, to return to the initial topic of this post...

Since backlinks apparently are of certain value to search engines it is desirable to have those links counted in BBs, right?

And somehow your topic was dealing with making certain that the BB would be crawled?
Are BBs and boards not usually crawled like other sites?

 

Yes all backlinks are good backlinks.

Yes and Yes. Just like any other page created dynamically and using excessive query strings e.g.'?ID=@@@34323244554333333333rrxyz&dat=6777979252&ind=blablabla' there is a danger that they will be ignored by search engines. The mods mentioned here make the phpBB post URLs spiderable.

Mick

 

Ah, now I see what this is all about! Thanks for the clarification, Arnica.
Hard to imagine that our electronic monsters get weary of reading long addresses!
In any event, one can only hope that the admin of the boards we post in do those mods!

 

I followed theese instructions as suggested.

2 days later my forum totally disappeared from google,

With no google listing at all, im basically going to have to close my website down and start totally from stratch, that's 6 months of work promoting it down the pan. And before you ask no i dont backlink, clone etc

I know that your only trying to help, but please can you test your mods before you start giving them out. Some of us depend on phpbb as a source of income.

 

Nothing to do with the help I offered. Of course this code was tested...

Sorry to hear your site was (permanently?) removed from Google, can't see how it's connected to the above coding though - esp in such a quick time frame.

I've advanced on from this tutorial as I found Phpbb restrictive, so now use SWF with extra mods for SEO

 

There is a phpBB mod that has been available for almost a year now that comes with clear concise instructions to do the above mentioned and more. Check the phpBB mod database.

 

Yep I guess there probably is, so would recommend users to check out the updated instructions. Please remember I first made thispost back in 2004!

 

If you want your forum to get spridered (which you should unless you are running something illegal) then I recommend only following the parts of this guide which show you how to remove session id's for guest user's. Also you may wish to disallow search.php and memberlist.php in robots if your server isnt particularly fast.

As for the guy above who claims he disapeared from google and therefore has to start from scratch - rubbish. Delete your robots.txt and wait half a month. I bet you you'll be back in google with your orginal position.

 

Any more helpful tips to get phpBB better indexed?