SEO Recommnedations

[Silverado05]

Hello DCZ long time no talk. I have just upgraded one of my boards which was well overdue by 3 yrs... I am now using phpbb 3.0.2 and I have two of these site up on different sites and I am ready to launch them. Before I do I want to get the SEO mods installed. Your mods did such an incredible on my last forum I want to use them again on my new ones. Since it has been about 3 years I am not current on what is out there. So which SEO mod of yours is the latest and greatest that you would recommend using that? I can't remember which one I was using before. I think it was the middle one but not sure.

Also I am about to upload one of the forums from my test server to the live server. Does it make any difference in SEO if the forum is in the root or a sub dir I.E. forum?

-Thanks

[Silverado05]

Ok well I have gone ahead of Installed the Mixed mode mod as well as the GYM Sitemaps, Optimal Titles, Dynamic Meta Tags. Is their anything else you would recommend having? Do I need the no dub or zero dub mod? This is a new board just launched a couple of days ago and only has 7 topics on it and 15 posts with 4 members currently.

Also would it be better to have the tittle injected in the url or have it like it is now with mysite.com/topic1.html?

Everything seems to be working perfect as always. I do have a couple of minor bugs, but I will direct those issues in the correct forum.

-Thanks

[dcz]

Welcome back

So you should give a try to our SEO premod, it's very handy to maintain since we provide update packages just like phpBB does. It's including all our SEO mods at once, so you can try all the mod rewrite types (not online) to choose the one you like the best.

Usually, the mixed mod with the virtual folder trick is a good thing, it depends on your topic title average quality to go for the advanced one.

About converting your old board, you'll have to take car about the required redirections if you end up using different urls with phpBB3.
It's pretty easy, you just need to keep the old rewriterules up and running at the end of your new .htaccess, the zero duplicate would do the rest (yes it's a good thing to use it;)).

++

[Silverado05]

If I had seen the premod version sooner I would have used it. I already have like 4 mods on phpbb3 already which is all I am adding. My other new forum I am building uses a custom template, so I have to install by hand. I have just about everything you offer installed except for one minor bug that is preventing avatars and user information to display on topics. I was looking at the no dup mod but let me get your take on it.

I had my old forum up for about 3yrs and it went down in May of 08 it got hacked and I just didn't have time to mess with it so I let the server expire. I just got around to installing a new phpbb3 forum from scratch and starting all over. So my new board was launched Sept 2. form scratch all new. So everything with this new forum is brand new with no prior posts or topics. Here is the thing. My new forum is in the server root, the old one was in a dir called /forum/ I haven't currently made server side redirects so if anyone comes across forum/index.php or the forum director it will redirect to the new forum in the server. So I still have topics and posted indexed everywhere on Google from the old forum and it has been down for a couple of months. (thats how good your SEO stuff is, site goes down for months and you still get indexed... )

So is this one of those times just to let Google reindex the new site and let those old links disappear? Keep in mind my old forum was in dir forum and the new one is in the root. Also none of they data from the old forum exists anymore.

-Thanks

[dcz]

If it's been for month, there is not much to do to retrieve the old ranking, but you can still get the eventual old backlinks to serve your SEO a bit if you just redirect all the url in forum/ to the root :

Code: Select all

RewriteRule ^forum/.*$ / [L,R=301]

or :

Code: Select all

RewriteRule ^forum/.*$ http://www.example.com/ [L,R=301]

in case your server settings require the full path, put it before the first forum rewriterule.

Since the content is all new, there is no possibility to redirect on a per case basis, this RewriteRule will just redirect everything to your forum index, it's still better than nothing

++