Improvements to Advanced SEO URL

intel352 · Joined: 03 Aug 2008 Posts: 2

First, I'd like to say, you guys have constructed a nice product Smile

I'm the author of several SEO modules for the X-Cart shopping cart, and it was nice to see that I didn't have to write a new module for phpBB!

So, recently I installed phpBB 3.0.2, and installed your Advanced SEO modification. I immediately identified 2 areas of your modification that bothered me:

Lack of support for subfolders in the forum URLs
The existence of that "post3.html" bit, which frankly, really bothered me

Aside from those 2 issues, it's a great mod.

So, I decided to dig into the code, and within hours of my initial installation of your module, I had modified Advanced SEO to allow forum URLs structured in a folder fashion, and I had replaced the existence of postxx.html with the proper topic URL.

You can see the end results here, let me know what you think:
http://forum.phpsitesolutions.com

To clarify what I mean when I say I needed a folder structure for my forum URLs; when I tried to create a URL such as "forum-category/subforum-name", the result would be "forum-category-subforum-name". I prefer to have a more structured appearance to my URLs, and that is what I have now achieved on my forum installation.

If there is any interest in my donation of my code modifications back to the central project, I'll gladly do so, I just need to know whom to send my modifications too. Additionally, for the forum folder structure, I've only tested with the setting that *removes* the forum ID from the URL, so that may need to be worked around in the code...

Cheers

dcz

Happy you like our mods Very Happy

So about post urls, you must have missed the no duplicate mod, installed on the demo server and included in the SEO premod : http://phpbb3.phpbb-seo.net/

Then, about virtual dirs, you must have noticed that we already implemented one level of it : http://phpbb3.phpbb-seo.net/demo-en/

The idea was to keep the mod simple and efficient, going further than this (eg including all the forum and sub forum directory structure in urls) could even be counter productive SEO wise, but I'm sure that some could enjoy such feature, so do not hesitate to share Wink

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intel352 · Joined: 03 Aug 2008 Posts: 2

to clarify, I gave the freeform ability to define forum urls that appear to be in a folder/subfolder style.

so, this means that I'm now able to add a / in the forum url. sorry for not clarifying more first.

so there's no hit on performance, and I still get to have nicely structured forum urls.

I installed the no duplicate mod, which is fine, but considering the "postxx" links were on the homepage of the forum, those are links I didn't want SEs to have any trouble finding. BTW, I don't remember if your no-dupe mod mentions this, but if it's redirecting "postxx", then users likely need to remove the "post" reference from robots.txt

I'll get a diff together of my changes over the weekend.

Cheers

dcz

You mean while editing forums ?

About the no duplicate, you may confused with the zero duplicate mod. As you can see, there are no postxx.html urls on the demo server, eg with the no dupe installed and activated.

Then, we still keep the disallow on post urls in the robots.txt as an insurance, because bots, and especially google, are very fast when it comes to index previously disallowed urls, and very (very) slow to get rid of them once they are disallowed again.

So, it can save some useless crawling if one deactivate the zero dupe for a moment.

Of course, it's not as important as without the zero dupe, but still, it's an easy way to make sure about post urls indexing.

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