I am upgrading a board associated with a busy website from phpBB2 to phpBB SEO Premod V 3.0.1. The board has more than 700 registered members, but I have completely restructured the layout and it has been off-line a few weeks, so I am not concerned about maintaining the old URL structure.

I have done the following:

1) Installed phpBB SEO Premod V 3.0.1

2) Imported the database

3) Set all standard ACP options as I want them

4) Changed categories, created new forums, deleted some irrelevant posts, moved other posts, etc.

Everything to this point has gone very well. I am now ready to select phpBB SEO Class settings.

I have spent some time studying the various options and think I have good general understanding of them, except for issues relating to this statement: "The Advanced mod is the "harder" to deal with, it implies a good topic title moderation to really be better than the Mixed one."

1) Can you be more specific about exactly what an admin must be willing to do to derive benefit from the Advanced mod?

2) Is anything required other than rewording bad topic tiles to better ones?

3) What happens if a search bot indexes an original topic title before it is reworded? Does the system automatically generate 301 redirects to the improved URL?

4) Are there any other issues that make the Advanced mod "harder" to deal with (relating to other board changes, for example)?

Thanks all the work you have put into this.

admintiger wrote:1) Can you be more specific about exactly what an admin must be willing to do to derive benefit from the Advanced mod?

Using keywords in url is SEO for sure, but random words aren't really. That's the whole point about it, we're here talking about a forum, not about a CMS, in some cases, it's just impossible to maintain a good topic title quality in a forum. It all depends on the type of forum and the topics covered.

admintiger wrote:2) Is anything required other than rewording bad topic tiles to better ones?

Actually not, rewording the topic titles when they are meaningless to better ones will enhance topic urls as well. So, it's as well a matter of means, how much time will you be able to spend on rewording topic titles, could be a nightmare on a super active forum with a majority of bad topic titles ... The idea is that it's better to maintain a decent topic title quality in average with the advanced mod.
In many cases, the mixed mode is a good compromise, especially with the virtual folder trick, since it will still associate the forum keywords to the topic urls : example.com/forum-keywords/topicxx.html

admintiger wrote:3) What happens if a search bot indexes an original topic title before it is reworded? Does the system automatically generate 301 redirects to the improved URL?

Yes, the zero duplicate (included in the premod) will do the job, it will redirect all possible duplicates for topics, including typos and posts urls (if post redirection is at least set to "guest") :
http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/viewforum.php?f=61
http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/this-is ... t1220.html
http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=9275

admintiger wrote:4) Are there any other issues that make the Advanced mod "harder" to deal with (relating to other board changes, for example)?

A part from the topic title moderation, the advanced mod is a bit more complex and will for example require a bit more code for mods to be patched, things like that, but there is not much difference with the mixed one as far as complexity, the simple one as the advantage to work with almost all mods without additional code change.

admintiger wrote:Thanks all the work you have put into this.

you're welcome

Thanks for your clear and detailed response. Your answers are consistent with what I had understood from reading other explanations you have written and comments posted by others, but I wanted to be sure I hadn't missed something important before making a selection I might later regret.

User-entered topic titles are better than average on the board I am upgrading, because it was created for a special-interest group, but even so, some titles used in the past have been meaningless, misleading, poorly-worded, or misspelled. As part of the recent content reorganization I have scanned through and reworded bad titles to make them more descriptive. However, sometimes it is difficult to think of good titles myself, because of the nature of certain posts. Also, I have concerns about offending posters by changing what they wrote.

Because of that last concern I have added a note in the board rules that explains that meaningless, misleading, poorly-worded, or misspelled titles may be reworded.

admintiger wrote:Because of that last concern I have added a note in the board rules that explains that meaningless, misleading, poorly-worded, or misspelled titles may be reworded.

Looks like the solution, and if your topic titles mostly good, it's enough, it's no big deal if some topic titles are bad, what you really don't want is a majority of bad topic titles.

admintiger wrote:I wanted to be sure I hadn't missed something important before making a selection I might later regret.

This is the way to go man

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