Enjoying playing with your excellent mod. Am now putting final touches on and figuring out deployment strategy on our main site. A large phpBB installation that has been running without any modrewrite whatsoever. We really have just a few mods in effect for faster login and redirects etc.

I am going forward with MIXED mode, enabled sql rewriting, no SID, and I will enjoy the benefits of the better forum names in the urls and will allow most topics to be titled topicxxx except where I have one that is long standing and worthy of a pretty url.

Part of my confusion is about NoDuplicate and ZeroDuplicate. Clearly there are references using the old urls to posts on my forums in the search indexes and I don't want to mess that up. I also have a bridge to Coppermine photo gallery and hopefully it will not be impacted as it only deals with the login.php.

I have read for several hours all the articles and posts regarding these issues, and maybe my brain is just used up for the evening.

But can you please just spell out whether I should or should not install these, and if so how to configure so as not to make the search indexes angry? lol

I have yet another other issue - I wrote a hot topics script that runs on the home page of our site and it directly pulls the last 10 posts from selected forums and puts some info and a link up using their old links. This must continue to work correctly so the old link styles need to stay. Is there a better strategy for displaying such a box on my home page?

I say the GYM/RSS mod and am thinking I might be able to use that instead of my script that goes right to the topics table in the DB, although the script I wrote was quite simple to get running.

What are highlights removing? Is this sticky or announcements?

Another - will the phpBB3 automatic updates still work with all these modifications to the initial source. What will the upgrade path be when .6 or .7 rolls out?

I also saw some discussion on whether or not to use the robots.txt - or to wait until later. Man this is a powerful mod but I cannot afford to screw this up as our site is #3 in the world in its keyword search space. I would also happily invest in some consulting time to go high bandwidth on these issues.

Thanks in advance,
Mike

So, first, since you did not run any url rewriting before, you will have to install at least the zero duplicate mod to handle all the required redirecting. The only setting you'll need will be to set the "post redirection option" to at least guests.

About the robots.txt, you're in the case where you need to wait at least two month after you started to redirect old url to new ones before you implement it. Since you mentioned having a big forum, you should even wait a bit more (6 month isn't too much to make sure that all SE will have caught up with the new urls).

I don't think that you'll run into trouble with your Coppermine bridge, but as always, it's better to first try all this on a local server.

About future updates, for sure the easiest path will be to use our SEO premod since we maintain the same update packages as for phpBB only. This way, you would not have to worry about the SEO and phpBB update part when updating, only about your other code changes.

Going for the seo premod should not be that difficult since your forum does not have many mods. You could just re install them on it, and mod you current style for it before you would just connect it to your db.

Highlights removing is an option to strip highlights for guest (and bots). Highlights are used when searching, to highlights the words searched for, example :
example.com/phpBB/topic.html?hilit=myword
Since these could be duplicate, you can only allow your registered user to use them. Note that our meta tag mod will through a no index tag on such urls, so you can still keep the functionality for guests with the meta tag mod (included in the SEO premod).

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DCZ I want to thank you for taking the time to confirm and answer my questions. As a programmer I completely understand how much work you put into this mod and greartly appreciate your work.

Per your advice we actually have been testing on a live server we use for development additions and are close to deployment.

One other thing about updates I thought I would mention to get your opinion on - yes we are deploying your premod package. We have added zero dup and no dup, gym-rss, dynamic meta, optimal titles, gym-rss. Generally the only other mods we use are some to speed up the response upon post and login (prime's instant tweaks).

Every time there is an update will we have to manually install all of those different seo mods? zero dup, no dup, dynamic meta, optimal titles, gym-rss?

What I am going to suggest is it sure would be nice to have a premod that is not only the base ultimate seo, but a pre mod that includes no dup, zero dup, and possibly some of the others. Since they are not enabled unless you turn them on in the ACP it wouldn't hurt to include them in the premod or an enhanced premod that includes all your goodies. Of course this likely means more work for you but when the core phpBB3 updates you already have to retest all your mods on it anyway and advance the supported release number. Call it the mega premod!

Am I missing something?

Once again thanks for all you do.
Regards,
Mike

TheKog wrote:DCZ I want to thank you for taking the time to confirm and answer my questions. As a programmer I completely understand how much work you put into this mod and greartly appreciate your work.

You're welcome

TheKog wrote:Am I missing something?

Yes, our SEO premod does includes all our seo mods, and so does its update packages

So you do not have to install any SEO mod with it.

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oops - i am such an idiot (sometimes), lol. I started with Ultimate and used the "premodded" 3.0.5 files that came with it. THen I have gone about adding each of your mods individually. Well at least I understand them all really well now!

Next task - start over with our base and use the total premodded package and get back to where I am now. Practice makes perfect! Thanks again.

Please show us the result when it's ready

Okay DCZ it's operational now at http://www.jaxkayakfishing.com
Just need a few more tweaks. ALso wondering if I should reduce the post redirections or to just let them happen. Notice I have a script that sets up links into the forum on the home page too.

I still have one kind of important issue - phpBB/index.php is getting redirected to phpBB/ - I do not want this as my page rank for my index.php is quite good. How can I disable this one redirect? I think I got the right effect by setting seo statics in the setup file, but wouldn't it be better if there was no redirect at all on that page for Google sake?

Great

TheKog wrote:ALso wondering if I should reduce the post redirections or to just let them happen. Notice I have a script that sets up links into the forum on the home page too.

And this script uses post urls, well, it would be a bit better to issue topic urls, but as is (eg redirected for at least guests), it's ok, the HTTP 301 redirecting will kill the dupe before they are indexed (and the resulting url will).

TheKog wrote:I still have one kind of important issue - phpBB/index.php is getting redirected to phpBB/ - I do not want this as my page rank for my index.php is quite good. How can I disable this one redirect? I think I got the right effect by setting seo statics in the setup file, but wouldn't it be better if there was no redirect at all on that page for Google sake?

For this, you could have done what you want, it was not a drama (at all) to keep the shorter url, since the redirection would have told google to now consider using the new url instead of the old one. PR would have been transmitted after a while, and SERP would not have changed, and that's what matters the most.
We did a complete redirection of all phpBB SEO urls couple times already, and without any lost in SERP or referrals. PR even went higher on forum indexes last time, but since PR is now pretty close to live, it's not really relevant, it could have gone higher / lower without this.

So now, it's http://www.jaxkayakfishing.com/phpBB/ to be redirected to http://www.jaxkayakfishing.com/phpBB/index.php (before it was the opposite) and it's very good as is, because otherwise, you would have two urls for the same page.

And if you have backlinks to the url without index.php, it does not matter, they will count for the url with index.php

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