HI dcz and Seo Team...first I would I wanna say a "Big THANK YOU!" This is one of the best and nicely written MOD I've even seen! Its such a massive MOD and the documentations you had provided with these are excellent that made the installation process so much more easier!!

I just installed the following MODs to my live board last night:
1) Ultimate SEO URL (Using the Advanced Mode)
2) Zero Duplicate Mod
3) No Duplicate Mod
4) Related Topic MOD

They all work great and luckily no errors. My board has been online for over 3 years and it has over 2000 pages that are already indexed with google. So I carefully read your documentations and hopefully I've set it up right. However, I do have some doubts and questions and hopefully you guys can advise me:

1) Robots.txt file: I read that for migrating board, you recommend to install the Zero Duplicate first and then add the robots.txt file couple of months later. I noticed that the Zero duplicate MOD does the job of diverting the viewtopic urls to these seo urls automatically. If this is already doing so, do I still need to add the robots.txt file later to drop the access to viewtopic urls for bots? If I do add the robots.txt later, what happens to the links in my old forum pages where users have linked to other posts in my forum itself and that still has the viewtopic url? These links wont be crawlable as well? I dont understand the need for this so can you clarify this for me plz?

2) Facebook likes: Some of the forum pages already has a few facebook likes to it. Now that I have set up this URL MOD, would this affect the facebook likes links? would the Zero duplicate MOD take care of that?

3) Forum Titles without IDs: I have selected no IDs for the forum titles (i think you do the same for this site as well isint it?). But when I rename the forum title, it doesnt auto divert the page although the Zero Duplicate is installed. I remember reading in one of your documentation somewhere that when having a forum title with no ID and if the name is changed later, the previous name will be considered as a separate forum itself and will cause a page not found error. In the future if I rename any forum url names, what steps do I need to take so the previous name doesnt cause 404 error? Do I manually need to add the change of name to my .htaccess?

4) Length of Title: I have a length of upto 250 chars for the forum titles and some users has long title descriptions. Since I am currently using the advanced mode (as its best suited for me) so the title tag is auto inserted to their URL, these long titles creates a v long URL. Would this affect google indexing or SEO ranking is any ways? I know that I can manually edit the url using sql rewriting method but it could take me a while before I can manually edit the old topics I've got so far since there are quite a few of them. So I was wondering will long url have negative effects if I dont edit them?

I wanna thank you once again...I was a little worried at a beginning trying to make sense of it all but after initial testing on my offline board first, it made clear sense! AWESOME MOD!

hi guys..i have a question again regarding the facebook likes that I had posted in my last post. I just noticed that my forum index page doesnt show the "likes" that it had before. A few people had liked my index.php page before but after setting up the ultimate url mod, it doesnt show the likes anymore...I think it may be because, I changed the index.php to 'forum.html' by adding this to phpbb_seo/includes/setup_phpbb_seo.php:

Code: Select all

$this->seo_static['index'] = 'forum';

Now that its been renamed to forum.html, do I need to add this change to my htaccess with a 301 redirection? Is this why the facebook likes are not showing now?? Can someone plz advise me? I would really appreciate any help plz....

anyone??

Can someone plz tell me if I need to add a htaccess 301 redirection if I changed my forum index.php to forum.html plz? I am concerned if I would loose my page ranking..!!

Why doesnt anyone answer my posts? Its been almost 3 days since I installed this MOD and I am really worried if I will loose my current page ranks for my index.php since its now renamed to forum.html...

All I wanna know is if I need to add a 301 redirect in htaccess so google knows that index.php is renamed to forum.html???

Plz....can someone please advise me!!!!

I am not trying to be annoying by bumping this topic...I just need an answer from someone who understand all of these... thats all!

I understand your frustration. Unfortunately, as awesome as phpBB SEO is, nobody has yet figured out how to make a living at this full time. We are all volunteers here. We have other lives.

I am totally not an expert at this particular aspect. I have never been all that worried about page rank, myself. I figure if the quality is there, SERP's will follow.

I don't think it's necessary to 301 your index.php. If it were, the auto-generated .htaccess file would have it in there. But it might not hurt? I'm sorry I don't have a better answer. If you'd like to try it,

Code: Select all

RewriteRule ^forum\.html$ /index.php [QSA,L,NC,R=301]

If I understand correctly, the 301 redirect tells google it has been permanently moved, and the page rank should follow. However, I have no real idea if that is true or not. dcz could give a more definitive answer, and hopefully he will next time he drops in.

All advice here is freely given, with the understanding that we may be wrong sometimes. As always, use any advice you receive at your own risk.

If you don't have a google webmaster account, get one. They have some tools that tell you how well the robots are crawling your site and what they find there.

1) Robots.txt file: I read that for migrating board, you recommend to install the Zero Duplicate first and then add the robots.txt file couple of months later. I noticed that the Zero duplicate MOD does the job of diverting the viewtopic urls to these seo urls automatically. If this is already doing so, do I still need to add the robots.txt file later to drop the access to viewtopic urls for bots? If I do add the robots.txt later, what happens to the links in my old forum pages where users have linked to other posts in my forum itself and that still has the viewtopic url? These links wont be crawlable as well? I dont understand the need for this so can you clarify this for me plz?

Yes, I believe that is correct. The purpose for that is for a while, you will have two identical pages (to bots). You'll still have the old viewtopic? links and the new .html links coexisting at the same time, which will hurt your PR.

Facebook likes: Some of the forum pages already has a few facebook likes to it. Now that I have set up this URL MOD, would this affect the facebook likes links? would the Zero duplicate MOD take care of that?

I know nothing about that mod, sorry. You may wish to open those posts, edit them and save them to be sure the links are updated. I don't know how that mod works, though. The old links may already be in FB's database, in which case the zero dupe should permanently redirect them for you.

Forum Titles without IDs: I have selected no IDs for the forum titles (i think you do the same for this site as well isint it?). But when I rename the forum title, it doesnt auto divert the page although the Zero Duplicate is installed. I remember reading in one of your documentation somewhere that when having a forum title with no ID and if the name is changed later, the previous name will be considered as a separate forum itself and will cause a page not found error. In the future if I rename any forum url names, what steps do I need to take so the previous name doesnt cause 404 error? Do I manually need to add the change of name to my .htaccess?

I believe that is also correct. I don't know if you would need to add changed forum titles to the .htaccess, but it sounds like a distinct possibility. I haven't ever had the need. Offhand, I would say that if you just installed this mod, then changed to no forum ID's, and you've renamed the forum in forum url management, then for now at least there is no need to redirect the /forum-name-f2/ links because they probably only existed for a few minutes before you changed them. Or are you referring to something else?

Length of Title: I have a length of upto 250 chars for the forum titles and some users has long title descriptions. Since I am currently using the advanced mode (as its best suited for me) so the title tag is auto inserted to their URL, these long titles creates a v long URL. Would this affect google indexing or SEO ranking is any ways? I know that I can manually edit the url using sql rewriting method but it could take me a while before I can manually edit the old topics I've got so far since there are quite a few of them. So I was wondering will long url have negative effects if I dont edit them?

Why do you need such long titles and descriptions? Again, I'm not an expert, but I would think the shorter your URL's are, the more efficient they are and the more readable by humans they are. I would think that would be helpful, SEO-wise. At the least, super-long URL's are aesthetically displeasing to me. YMMV.

I understand your frustration. Unfortunately, as awesome as phpBB SEO is, nobody has yet figured out how to make a living at this full time. We are all volunteers here. We have other lives.

I apologize coyote...I didnt mean to annoy the team with my posts and I do understand that the forum support is a volunteering service. I do respect that and once again, by no means dont take it offensive. I completely understand this since my board also runs as a volunteering service.

I thank you for your response and you have now cleared all of my concerns. I was more worried about the page rank being affected and thats why I was following up on that in particular. Now it makes more sense...Much obliged!