Hello everyone,

First, I might be a new member but I've been lurking around your forum for a while now and truly appreciate all of your work to put such great information all in one spot! I've been reading a lot about SEO for the past few months and have learned quite a bit here...which is amazing since I am 100% new to the idea of SEO and barely understand 10% of what I read elsewhere. So, thank you very much.

Second, I apologize if the follow seems a like a bunch of silly questions...I began my own forum due to a love for my hobby and have no prior experience in the internet other than visiting websites. I have had my site for about 10 months now though and I am relatively confident with navigating phpbb files, adding/removing mods, and have a general sense for how the phpbb forum format "works".

With that being said though, I have done a lot of work in regards to SEO in regards to creating as much content as possible (without cheapening information or being too overtly obvious), as well as a lot of 'external' work to create links and content related to my forum on other sites. The problem is, I only rank well when a search uses about a dozen or so keywords but my forum encompasses much more. Because I feel as though my forum covers a subject that is relavent and has a large forum following on other websites, I have been looking at your SEO mods for quite some time now.

I am hoping that I can find some solice here because I have some concerns.

My initial concern - which may be unfounded as I've only read about it via hearsay - is the notion that SEO mods may conflict with other mods. This could be a problem for me because I do have a lot of mods installed, some of which I am sure bring me many many hits each month (for example, the arcade and gallery mods), and I'm just not sure what mods - if any - I would have to remove. Of course, my second question would be, does the potential for your SEO mods creating a conflict exist and if so, is there some sort of list of known conflicts that I could browse through?

My second, and perhaps greatest, concern relates choosing the best path to follow for adding your SEO mods. As the title of the thread suggests, I am at a crossroads for a couple of reasons. Most notably, the company I host my forum on has recently upgraded from using MySQL 4 to MySQL 5 and this has caused a lot of problems for some reason or another so it would not be the end of the world if I had to start over once again, creating an opportunity to use your Pre-Modded version of phpBB. As I understand it, phpBB 3.6 might also be available soon as well and (because I was even more of an newbie than I am not) I clearly remember how painful it was for me to make the upgrade from phpbb 3.4 to 3.5; which again, might provide a clean slate for me to add your SEO mods first, and reinstall my other mods second. Of course, there is always the option of adding your SEO mods to my forum as it stands right now.

With all of that in mind, I am wondering what your much more educated opinion(s) might be if you happened to be in my shoes right now?

Again, thank you all for all of the information you provide to people like me. I sincerely appreciate your time.

-Atlantis
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EDIT: Would it be a bad idea, for the sake of familiarization, to install your SEO mods on a forum that is a sub domain of my main website?

Ok, never mind the above, sorry. I have decided and completed a fresh install using your pre-mod version of phpbb5.0 and have new questions

1). When reinstalling with the SEO pre-mod, I had to make a new set of database entries. Because I'm not really too familiar with this, what happened was a new set of database entries with the prefix "phpbbx_" were created in my old data base. In other words, I now have two data base entries for everything. I have the forum running on the right set of database entries now so can I and/or should I simply delete all entries that have the phpbbx_ prefix?

2). Should I first configure the SEO mod in the index page and then start adding mods again or should I add mods and then configure the SEO mods?

Thanks for your time!

Atlantis

You're raising quite some questions here ;)

So, about SEO mod conflicting with others, our url rewriting mode have been designed to reduce as much as possible such possibilities, the worst that can usually occur is to see a mod outputting un-rewritten urls to forums and / or topics. Which of course is not an actual conflict, and by the way is no harmful SEO wise either with the zero duplicate mod, and it is always possible to patch the mod to enable url rewriting when necessary.

But, some conflict could occur with the zero dupe, as explained in its install file, if a mod is for example adding &mod_var=value to a topic url (like the thanks mod for example), then the feature using that variable in url could not work at first in strict mode, because the url would be detected as duplicate and thus redirected. So it's not again a harmful conflict, but rather a feature deactivation, and of course, it is possible and fairly simple to fix it.

About mysql 4 and 5, it's always kind of problematic to migrate a mysql 4 db into mysql5. Fortunately, the phpBB group wrote a script that will create the sql query to perform in order to properly convert a mysql4 phpBB db imported into a mysql 5 server : http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/doesnt- ... ue-errors/
It's mandatory to do it.

About how and when to best implement our seo mods, and even if you seems to have already installed the seo premod, the first thing to do IMHO is to set up a local install of our SEO premod to be able to test the various option and better understand them. It's no time loss.
And if you later decide to go for the seo premod, then, you can first do it on your local install to make sure that when you actually go online, everything will work as expected. Especially if you're using many other mods and if you're updating.
So clearly, waiting for 3.0.6 could have been worth it since it should be released quite soon. But it's not a drama, you just will have to update your premod.

The sub domain idea is not necessarily a good one. The thing is that the sud domain and the main one will more or less be considered as two sites as far as being well ranked in SERPs, so if you have a lot more content in your forum than in the rest of your site, separating them like this would result in the main site to be a lot smaller than it used to be. And it could cause some trouble in SERPs. Sub-domain reduction on phpBB SEO

Then, about going from phpBB to the premod, you should read this : phpBB3 => phpBB SEO premod
You did not need to actually install the premod, but since you seems to have done it, using phpbbx_ as table prefix, you can safely drop all phpbbx_ table as long as you did edit your config.php file to have the premod to use your previous db.

About point 2), the best would be to always first install mods on a local server to validate your code changes, it' very easy to forget about a bit of code or to perform a wrong copy past. And , the order does not matter as much, at least for mods performing db changes since in such case it is likely that you would need the mods code for the forum to work.

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Thank you very much for the great reply and advice. The article on setting up a local install was great and I will definitely use it from now on. I ironed out the problems with the MySQL update and think I have my site back to 'normal' now. I am already seeing results from the SEO mod! I am embarassed to say that because I used the phpBB SEO premod, I did forget to make sure that I made the edits to the styles I use so once I did that, things make a lot more sense now; especially the part about the last topic on the index page which I asked about in another post. So far, I haven't found any major conflicts with any of the mods I have reinstalled again so using the premodded phpbb 3.5 version offered here was a great opportunity to clean up the code on boards and like I mentioned, I am now seeing my site come up on Google when searching with a wider array of keywords.

Thanks again for your time and I will be sure to tell everyone I know about this site and your mods!

TG

You're welcome