New User saying Hello

Rick_M71 · Joined: 12 Nov 2007 Posts: 13

I'm a new user to phpbb-seo and I'm impressed with what I've seen thus far. It will be interesting to see if the search engines actually like the system or if they shy away. I'm surprised to find that many of the threads on this website don't seem to be ranking very well. I'm not sure if any of the admins have a theory as to why that is?

I did post a simple question earlier about why the admins chose the URL structure they did - the stickies seem to be using advanced URL's with the topics in the URL, whereas the general posts seem to have no words in the URL. I'm curious if there is some thought that having too many keywords in the URL's may actually be a problem now?

I'd describe myself as someone who is fairly knowledgable of SEO issues. I had been extremely successful back in 2004, but after some of the major algo updates on Google, I've found it difficult to rank well since. I also don't have a lot of time to devote to my websites like I used to.

I've been searching for a good free forum solution that is SEO friendly. I used to have xoops but found I was getting too much spam. I then switched to SMF and loved the software, but found that for some reason, google just hated the URL layout - even when I thought I had dealt with all of the duplicate content issues.

I then moved to bbPress, which actually ranks exceptionally well. The problem is that the layout is so boring that I find people don't care to register. I also missed out on not having a way to allow guest users to post with bbPress, which is important to keep a small forum active.

So, that leads me to here. I was tempted to go the vBulletin route, possibly with vbseo, but I don't really want to shell out the money, at least at this point.

As I said, I've been impressed with this software. I had a phpbb2 board a few years back, but just had too many spam registrations to deal with. I really like the captcha implementation and permission options in phpbb3. It seems like the SEO side has really been tweaked by the admins here - nice work with the URL's and the duplicate content issues.

Time will tell if it works for my site.

Thanks for all of the work you folks have put in.

SeO · Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2007 8:40 am Post subject: Re: New User saying Hello

And Welcome Very Happy

You actually tested a lot of forum software, I'm sure now, that you'll appreciate even more our phpBB3 SEO premod Cool

So, will our SEO solution make a (big) difference ?

I'm positive, the boost really can be tremendous. Of Course, the first thing to matter is content and content update rate, SEO is optimization, thus optimization of something, and here, we talk about content impact on SE.

0x100000000 = 0 to make it simple. No, or poor content will never be a good thing for a site success.
That's why it's hard to forecast how well SEO will be on a given site, it's relative to your site and it's eventual challenger in the same field.

This being said, if you do have content to offer in your forum, and if you work on it on adding new content on a regular (not necessarily hourly or even daily, but regular) basis, there is no doubt you'll obtain better ranking and SERPs faster with some "natural" SEO.

Example are many in this site.

About the phpBB SEO URL rewriting, it's experimental and yes, it allow for topic title injection on selected threads.

The idea being it was to make it easier to moderate, since topic title injection implies a rather good topic title quality in general, which can be quite some work on some forums.
That's why we offer three URL rewriting mods, to best fit the most type of forums.
You'll find more clues about this in this thread : http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-seo-toolkit/phpbb-seo-mod-rewrites-vt66.html

The thread mainly talk about the phpBB2 mod rewrite, the phpBB3 one are way more advanced, but, the principles used are the same.
And we'll be using the advanced one when we'll convert phpBB SEO, mainly because 1) our topic title general quality is generally ok and 2) it's in the end more user friendly (HB elaborated a bit on this post).

SEO wise, title injection can be good, but it's obviously linked to topic title quality and thus content quality. The case to avoid is when your topic title would all be of the type "hoh hoh hello, I found it now !!!!!" with no interesting keywords at all.

About PR transmission on phpBB SEO, I find it pretty good, for sure we do not have many PR 5 topics, but, if you compare, you'll barely find any PR on the phpBB.com threads, and worst, it looks like Google is missing most of its content : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aphpbb.com
27 800 pages indexed looks pretty far from truth to me (with 433317 topics), especially if we take into account the large amount of duplicate phpBB3 still use.

To be compared with http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aphpbb-seo.com : 5780 indexed pages with 3940 topics.

Talking about SERPs, being more important than PR actually, phpBB SEO really starts to rank well in the English speaking world : http://www.google.com/search?q=phpbb+seo&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seo+album
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=zero+duplicate

Examples are many ...

The fact that phpBB SEO is half french half English made it a bit harder in the English speaking world at first, but, still, we're on our way to the top of serps for many search queries. In the french speaking world, phpBB SEO already has site links and is kind of trusting the field : http://www.google.fr/search?q=phpbb+seo&hl=fr
http://www.google.fr/search?q=seo&hl=fr

So, take your time to test our premod, I'm sure you'll appreciate to be able to accurately chose the forum's URLs and to use them as virtual folder like on this board. And even more the fact you'll be able to remove all post duplicate from ACP and HTTP 301 redirect all duplicates Wink

Rick_M71 · Joined: 12 Nov 2007 Posts: 13

Thanks for the detailed response. The website where I installed php-seo doesn't seem to have high enough pagerank to be getting a lot of spidering lately. Also, the sitemap I'm using is only for bbpress, as I don't think you have released a sitemap mod for phpbb3 yet. I'll be looking forward to that mod coming out.

I learned a long time ago that SEO for the most popular terms is actually the hardest way to have a profitable and successful site. I found it interesting that you pointed out that your site ranks very well for a few two word searches. I have found that a bulk of traffic on a forum usually comes from the 3 and 4 word phrases people search for.

When I first visited your forum, it didn't seem like some of your forum's threads were ranking that well when I searched for specific phrases that were in topic titles. I would have expected them to rank 1st fairly easily. Those topics were indexed, but they didn't come up first when I searched for them in Google.

I just ran my test again, with this very thread and was pleasantly surprised with the result. A search for "New user saying hello" shows this thread as #1 (at least on my search). That's the way it should be. I don't know if I didn't do a thorough enough test last time, or if your site is suddenly ranking better - either way, good news.

I hadn't thought before about the issue of changing topic titles after a URL is created for a thread. I personally agree that having a good title/subject is much more important than keywords in the URL - and I think you did a smart thing by not including keywords in the URLs for all of the threads. I know on my board, I used to change subjects all of the time so that visitors would know right away what a thread was about. It's also good for SEO to have a title that matches content (and H1 tags used to matter - not sure if they still do and it looks like this forum doesn't seem to optimize H1 tag usage).

Now that the subject goes into my URL's, I'm not so sure I'll want to change the subject. It does look like you set-up the URLs nicely though, that if I do change the subject, even though the URL changes, it looks to me like the software will automatically redirect to the new URL (and I assume it is with a 301). I'll see how it goes.

Again, thanks for the great work on this software. I'm very happy with it so far, and I look forward to seeing some success with it.

Next step is for me to figure out how you do your portal front page, and then decide how I'm going to integrate my 50 old bbPress threads that are currently ranking very well in Google. I'md debating just leaving them as is - rather than redirect them to new threads in phpbb3.

dcz · Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 10:07 pm Post subject: Re: New User saying Hello