help getting started.

magicfun · Joined: 23 Oct 2006 Posts: 11

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum, but not so new to the phpBB forums. I am looking for a little direction on how to get started with SEO with my forum. I have an existing forum located at: http://www.magicianschool.com/forum

This forum is quickly growing every day, and has a lot of potential. Although I am fairly skilled at programming, I have very little knowlege of SEO and where to start first. There is so much information on SEO out there, I'd like a few recommendations and things to start with to begin SEO on my forum. I am kind of overwhelmed and don't know where to begin.

I am not sure which MODs to install or what works best, so I am ready for any input that will make indexing my forum a lot better. Currently I only have a few links on Google, and would like to improve my overall site ranking. If you could take a look at my site and note some things I could improve on, that would be great.

Anything you would recommend to have me start off with SEO?

Thanks for your help. Will be looking forward to it.

dcz · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 10:52 pm Post subject: Re: help getting started.

And welcome Very Happy

Nice project by the way, and I am sure you'll appreciate the SEO magic Wink

So, your forum is actually not indexed at all by Google, it's kind of normal with SIDs in URLs.

Your main domain get better results, but there would be some work to do as well : 111 pages listed, but almost all in the omitted results. It does not mean they won't show up in the results, nor that they'll stay here forever, it's often the case at first.

Anyway, talking about your forum, I think a good start would be to think about mod rewrite. We provide here three different mod rewrite solutions.
I think you should either go for the Advanced or Mixed phpBB SEO mod rewrite, it all depend on your topic title's quality and the effort you'll be ready to put into telling your user to avoid very bad titles. All we want to inject topic titles in URL is not too many ugly title with no keywords at all in them. You can read this post to find out more about this.

Then, you should think about dynamic meta tags and mx Google sitemaps.
The Google sitemaps system is very efficient to get crawled and cached well.
Then, mx sitemaps could be a nice addition, to help out bots crawling your deep content.

And do not hesitate to ask for help on implementing all these mods in theire release threads or about whatever SEO subject you'd like to find out more about Wink

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magicfun · Joined: 23 Oct 2006 Posts: 11

Hi, I recently did the guest sessions mod. Does this just take away the SID for guests only? So when google crawls the site it will index it better? It seems to have put in the SID when I am logged in, but not when a guest is browsing the forum. Is this what I want?

dcz · Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2006 4:59 pm Post subject: Re: help getting started.

Exactly.

The only Sid you'll see with the guest session mod is just after log-in and in acp, two things that bots do not see.

It's the first SEO step, the one that makes it possible for your forum to be indexed by search engine, because SID are almost making it impossible.

Mod rewrite is just here to go further into building even more friendly URLs for search engine's bots. It's optimization.

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magicfun · Joined: 23 Oct 2006 Posts: 11

Ok, so now I am off to do the rewrite mod. Which would be better for me ...the mixed or advanced rewrite?

How long does it take for google to spider the site and start indexing now that my SID is out of my titles?

magicfun · Joined: 23 Oct 2006 Posts: 11

I think I need to take a look at all of my php and inject my titles using those methods. I have a lot of content on my site that I think ---could benefit from this. Is it wise to use this throughout my site ...not just limiited to my forum?

dcz · Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 5:13 pm Post subject: Re: help getting started.

magicfun · Joined: 23 Oct 2006 Posts: 11

Hi, I've asked a question here to bring to your attention. I have since removed the MOD mixed re-write until I can get this issue resolved.

magicfun · Joined: 23 Oct 2006 Posts: 11

Hi, I have installed the ADVANCED MOD with the simple sub forums add on. I now have a question about my robots.txt file I have in my root folder.

I have forum titled: Off Topic

which is the link: off-topic-vf4.html

If I put:

Disallow: /forum/off-topic-vf4.html

In my robots.txt file, will this block robots from indexing everything under the "Off Topic" forum? This is what I want to do, but I want to make sure I am getting the syntax right.

Also- What about if I want to block a forum, but not a sub-forum in that forum. If I block the parent forum, does it block all the sub-forums beneath it?

magicfun · Joined: 23 Oct 2006 Posts: 11

Maybe I am confused because my forums are no longer in folders. For example my forum "General Magic Discussion" is displayed as:

forum/general-magic-discussion-vf2.html

I see on this website forum, it is actually made as a folder...something like:

forum/forum/general-magic-discussion/

Is there a way for me to do this as well so it will be easier to follow and block certain things in my robots.txt?

dcz · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 6:15 pm Post subject: Re: help getting started.

Well, actually, no. The virtual folder injection trick will be available for phpBB3.

And anyway, it seems you got confused a bit with the robots.txt standard.

If you disallow /forum/off-topic-vf4.html, it will only concern "/forum/off-topic-vf4.html" eventually followed by some more text.

For example :

magicfun · Joined: 23 Oct 2006 Posts: 11

I think I am more confused...

I have put my topic here

I don't even know if this is the right place for it.

So can I not make my forum links in folders like you have with this site?

dcz · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 9:44 pm Post subject: Re: help getting started.

Well again, not with phpBB2, here are some more posts talking about this :

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-mod-rewrite/discussions-vt153.html
http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-mod-rewrite/discussions-vt41-15.html#449

But the results are here with the phpBB SEO mod rewrites. They do exactly what's demonstrated on the demo forum, you can select mod rewrite on this page.

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