recommendations for phpbb3 topics

[ViS]

Hi,
I would like to get your opinion about a code modification I did for phpbb3 with phpbb-seo toolkit installed.

I just got to give recommendations to user visiting a particular topic, providing in a box under the last post, links to topics about the same subject.

I did that just doing a search on my forum using the subject of the current topic. In my forum it works well for two reason:

1. It's a forum about toys and each topic must have "Brand : Name" as title
2. It's a really young forum where only me and few other people are writing in, so titles are really under control and searches are not too long to do because of the few topics.

I did that for :
- getting users surf to other topics about toys of the same brand or type of toys
- increasing (and here your opinion would be really appreciated) the qualyty of semantic context of each topic for search engines.

Do you think will it help to better rank on search engines?

The forum is at : MeLoCompri.it, it's in italian, try topics in "Opinioni" for example.

[dcz]

Well yes, it's a good idea.

Related topic links can help both users and bots to find content, so as long as you do not put too many, it's useful and efficient.

As far as the quality of topic semantic context, it will help too, but as always, it will help even more if the topic content's quality is good and the related topic content is good and related as well.

So, it's increasing content's impact, but it won't do miracle for poor content.

The more general effect will be to provide more links to topics, and for the most on related pages, and this is good for PR and indexing.

++

[ViS]

Thanks for the answer. Good to know it.

After reaching 100 posts, results are better provided (because phpbb starts avoiding common terms).

Just a little problem I saw doing searces is that I had to delete from the template (in the search page) the list of the last searches that have been done because all the searches I did for topic recommendations make it useless.

[HB]

I just got to give recommendations to user visiting a particular topic, providing in a box under the last post, links to topics about the same subject.

My approach to SEO is simple: If it works for users, it usually works for search engines. To wit, I've made modifications to make it easier for users to find the information they need, in the hope that they'll find previous answers to their question, and thereby the forum's discussion quality will be enhanced. Not everyone looks for information in the same manner, so I've provided several venues:

• Related topics, Part I - directly beneath a thread, it matches keywords from the source topic title to other threads.
  
• Related topics, Part II - to increase the likelihood of "good" related topics matches, I manually flag some threads as FAQs and Favorites worthy. The related topics matching is done twice - one for an open search against the entire forum, another against only those topics flagged as FAQs. Obviously the forum must have a few hundred FAQs before this strategy works well.
  
• FAQs and Favorites sticky - each forum includes a personally vetted list of "best" threads, categorized for ease of reference. While new visitors invariably ignore it , it at least saves regular forum visitors from having to search. That is, repeat questions get references to existing topics on the same subject, plus a few added suggestions. Frequently this revives an "oldie but goodie" thread with a new angle.
  
• FAQs and Favorites Digest - some people just don't relate to searching through the forums, but will scan a good article. I generate a "FAQs and Favorites Digest" article from the above stickies + the vetted related topics list. The result is a two-page article; page one is the best of the forums, manually categorized, the second is a more exhaustive list.
  
• Announcements - while not precisely your question, I also added an announcements list above the forum. It includes references to recent discussions of note and "quoteable quotes". This encourages regular and new visitors to follow noteworthy discussions. The announcements are nothing more than a specialized forum whose contents are shown above the forum index in ultra compact format. Regular visitors get in the habit of checking it first, which provides a good venue for low-noise, high impact announcements (e.g., contests, new polls, sponsored events, etc.).

Before anyone asks, NO, I don't have these modifications in a shareable format. Someday I would like to clean them up and submit them to phpBB as MODs... but not today. And before anyone asks, NO, I don't know if and when I'll get around to it.

[ViS]

My approach to SEO is simple: If it works for users, it usually works for search engines.

Ok, it's the suggestion many times I heard, "think your forum first for your users and then for search engines".

I really appreciate your post, there a lot of useful suggestion (I had a look to your forum to check all the points and found them really well done).

Related topics, Part I - directly beneath a thread, it matches keywords from the source topic title to other threads.

did you use a search to accomplish that or wrote down some code by yourself? I was concerned with search performance but seems to work well on your forum (if you used a search I mean)

FAQs and Favorites sticky

that's another good idea, that solves one problem I was thinking of for my forum when it will begin to grow up, that is to categorize topics in different manner than how the forum is organized. For instance, in my case, toy brands or ages.

Announcements

It looks like the no duplicate mod part to "add a link to the last active topic in the forum index listing, above the regular last post one.", only annoucements are human edited (I think) and can contain much more useful links that just the last one. Useful for crowded forums, but, guys, seems to need a lot of work to follow everything.

Before anyone asks, NO, I don't have these modifications in a shareable format. Someday I would like to clean them up and submit them to phpBB as MODs... but not today. And before anyone asks, NO, I don't know if and when I'll get around to it.

scared guy!!! I hope you'll accept some question

Vincenzo

[HB]

did you use a search to accomplish that or wrote down some code by yourself? I was concerned with search performance but seems to work well on your forum (if you used a search I mean)

It's a slightly modified version of the related topics MOD.

[ViS]

It's a slightly modified version of the related topics MOD.

thanks a lot, I'll have a look at it.

Vincenzo.