Some Questions...

XiNiTHAOUS · Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 3 Location: PhantomP2P.co.uk

Hey All,
My board requires you to register before seeing the forums, and also includes several hidden forums that normal members can't see. What I want to know is, what is the best way to create a spiderable archive and also an RSS feed that shows topics that users with normal permissons can usually see? Basically missing out hidden forums. Can anyone point me in the right direction? The board is heavily modified using IMPortal as a CMS.

Regards,
XiN

dcz · Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2006 10:37 am Post subject: Re: Some Questions...

And Welcome Very Happy

Mx Google sitemaps will only list the public forum's content, and mx sitemaps will only list the content one can read (eg public forums for guests).
The mx google sitemap update will as well generate RSS 2.0 feeds.

The problem with private forums is that you cannot have them indexed. On you forum, I only see two public forums with 2 topics and 17 messages.

This is all the content that can be listed so far, 2 forums and 2 topics.

I guess that if you're looking for more search engine visitors, you'll have to add quite some public content.

You can as well think about some URL rewriting, but again, SEO is optimization, so you need some public content to optimize.

About the mods, the two sitemaps solution, xml Google and regular html, should not cause trouble, unless with CH, as they do not change a single phpBB line of code.

The mod rewrites should as well cause no trouble, the worst that could happen besides mistakes upon install, is to see some URL unrewritten at first, like the simple sub forum ones or the last active topic on index one. In most case the patch is easy and if not already to be find on phpBB SEO, will be released upon demand.
If you do not feel confident with mod_rewrite and such, it's a wise thing to spend one hour of local testing, the mods are easy to install and this will help you out going online without problems.

I think you should take your time to put together an SEO strategy before you install anything. This mean to ask yourself if you want to leave this few amount of public content on your forum, what kind of content (already existing in the private forums maybe) could be posted publicly and would that be enough (more than few URLs) and will you have time to post more and more on a regular basis.
Once you have made up your mind about this, it will be time to choose the best mod rewrite solution for your project and to install the sitemaps modules.

Because if you leave things as they are now, there is no real point to optimize anything.

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XiNiTHAOUS · Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 3 Location: PhantomP2P.co.uk

Thanks for taking your time to reply, and thanks for the welcome Smile

Basically the site is an eD2k link indexing site, it indexes links on the eDonkey2000 network. What I am trying to achieve is that people can find the releases via Google and then find there way to the site. The only problem as you say is the Guest Permissions which only enable you to see two forums, when registered there are I think around 80, with a further 5 hidden. I do have the Simple-Subforums mod installed by the way. What would your suggestion be?

Thanks,
XiN

dcz · Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2006 11:03 am Post subject: Re: Some Questions...

As said, you need public pages to get listed.
No public page, no pages indexed, no search results to them.

I don't know about your project, but it's very possible you can add public articles about the "releases", depending of course on how "legal" are they. These could be your doors for search engine visitors.
There are as well many other way to add content, it's all a matter of what are your willing to write about publicly.

For the simple sub forum mod, the patch is here for the mod rewrites.

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XiNiTHAOUS · Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 3 Location: PhantomP2P.co.uk

Thanks

Will work on a featured releases public section, taster section or similar. Its all legal as its only linking to files elsewhere Smile