[meta] Dynamic Meta Tags and search stop words...

TBA · Joined: 04 Jun 2008 Posts: 4

Ok I have both the Dynamic Meta Tags 0.2.2 and Optimal Titles mods installed on phpbb 3.0.1 pro-silver based style. I am using full text mySql as the search backend.

When I view a topic (viewtopic.php) the meta tags are being taken from the first post in the thread BUT the keywords are including words that are contained in the phpbb default search ignore words file. Words like "the, you, and, etc." I thought that for viewtopic.php words that are contained in the search ignore list would NOT be included in the meta tags for view topic.

I have tried using both the native full text backend and the mySql search backend and neither seems to work. I have rebuilt the search tables but does not seem to make any difference. Any suggestions?

Oh and by the way - thanks much for these great mods. I still find it amazing that there are people willing to devote so much of their time to help others - nice work Very Happy

dcz

TBA · Joined: 04 Jun 2008 Posts: 4

Couple of things first. I am using Bl@ck style (Pro Silver colorized theme) and have the prosilver styles, theme, etc. deactivated. No other styles. Mods I have installed already:

NV Last Post Topic Title
Anti Bot Question
Red Bar 06
Prime Links
FAQ Manager
Dynamic Meta Tags 0.2.2 Optimal Titles

Hope you can find out what seems to be the problem with the meta keywords including common stop words.

Hey thanks once again.....I appreciate the effort you put in here

TBA · Joined: 04 Jun 2008 Posts: 4

no idea what is happening with the meta keywords?

SeO

mm, I guess we'll fix this in the next update. It's no real big deal, but still, common words should not show up there.

TBA · Joined: 04 Jun 2008 Posts: 4

So.....you're saying I should uninstall the mod until this is fixed? I mean to say - with keywords like that I doubt any of the posts will get ranked very high even if g(a)ggle does not put emphasis on them much anymore.

SeO

Still better than no meta tag at all or worst, repeated ones IMHO.

wwwmaster · Joined: 10 Mar 2007 Posts: 9

Three issues here..

First, as far as I know, when using MySQL Fulltext indexing, the stopwords have to be listed in MySQL configuration. Therefore the stopwords listed in stopwords file have no effect.

Second, dynamic meta tags MOD depends on Fulltext native indexing, it doesn't access the MySQL index for information on words in posts.

Third, I just looked at the code for phpBB 3.02. There is a function called get_ignore_words() in includes/search/search.php. However, this function isn't called anywhere in phpBB.

So, this means that the stopwords file isn't used at all. This topic gives more info on the subject.

Basically they seem to think that the ignore words list feature is obsolete, and should be removed. They want to use the automatic common words feature instead.

However, this is problematic with SEO, since some common words are useful in meta keywords. For example, on this site the word SEO is definitely a common one, but it should still show up in the keywords..

dcz

You're very right, and phpBB3 does not even use the get_synonyms function ...

The common word implementation is not really good for SEO as you said since most important keywords will most likely be ignored for searches and thus meta at this stage.

What could be great to both enhance the search tables and to end up with better meta tags would be to re-enable the stop words while building the index and then to implement a white list to prevent some important words to end up in the common words.
This way we could end up with lighter search tables (can be a lot with a good stop word list) and better meta tags.

I did not looked thoroughly to the mysql full text implementation, but this should not be too hard to implement for the native one.

I'll go deeper into this as soon as I'll have had enough time to convert phpBB SEO to phpBB3, it's not to much of a big deal since the meta do not matter this much, and they are already pretty decent, since they are dynamic and only use content from the page.

You could though, if you do not use native search indexes, disable the SQL query made in viewtopic.php (with the last version of the mod, it's one of the few option that can be set in the class, explained in the install) and only use the first post content.

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