phpBB Search Engine Optimization Feedback

[Darth Pincho]

Before / After Report for Tupincho.net

Date : 08/02/2007 (dd/mm/yy)
Forum URL : http://www.tupincho.net/foro/

Previous Report(s) :
look before in this same thread (09/10/2006 (dd/mm/yy) )

Indexing :
Absolute number of pages : 7795

• Google : http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=s ... o.net/foro
  387 pages ( i dont know how many are cached)
  Was :
  
  08/02/2007 (dd/mm/yy) : 133 pages ( i dont know how many are cached)
• Yahoo : http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site:w ... o.net/foro
  1586 pages ( i dont know how many are cached)
  Was :
  
  08/02/2007 (dd/mm/yy) : 34 pages ( i dont know how many are cached)
• MSN Search : http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=si ... o.net/foro
  141 pages ( i dont know how many are cached)
  Was :
  
  08/02/2007 (dd/mm/yy) : 49 pages ( i dont know how many are cached)
• Altavista : http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q= ... o.net/foro
  0 pages (apparently altavista only show my pages under site:www.tupincho.net and not on site:www.tupincho.net/foro/ i dont wanna incluide my main site because uses subdreamer CMS and not phpbb-seo plugins)
  Was :
  
  08/02/2007 (dd/mm/yy) : 125 pages (i dont know how many are cached)

Google PageRank

• Google PageRank : 0
  Was :
  
  08/02/2007 (dd/mm/yy) : 2
• Predicted Google PageRank : 0
  Was :
  
  08/02/2007 (dd/mm/yy) : n/a
• PageRank Transmission :
  I have no idea. No forums have get PR transmission

Search Engine Optimizations :

mod Rewrite : Yes Advanced mode + Zerodupe

• mx Google Sitemaps : Yes
• mx Sitemaps : No
• Others : Yes.
  Dynamic meta tags, with rebuilded search tables.

Recently move my page to a better host. I hope now google can index the pages successfully

[dcz]

So things are better than before.

You new host is faster than the previous, it should be better in the future

++

[HB]

As the switch was instant, it should be quite different at the end of the month, the zero dupe will have gotten rid of most of the older URLs (here vanilla ones) and the dupes as well, I know you did a good job with your robots.txt, but you'll reduce the pagination ones, and they are many.

I believe most of the pagination URLs were eliminated a few months ago when I cobbled together my own "zero dupe". However, your implementation is quite a bit slicker than mine.

Bots must be crawling like crazy nuts right now

Not so much. Guest traffic is higher than normal due to busy bots, but the site's performance is unaffected. Apparently the redirects are faster than I thought.

[dcz]

Well, I must admit, we do warn people a lot about this mod, but it's far less sensible that this if you just follow the installation steps.
It is as well very true you'd have trouble with wrong headers and could have hard time redirecting on a really weak server.
The code is fast, a redirection costs far less than two pages loads, but still a bit more than a straight page loading.
I think that many mods do add more process than this one, even with a redirection.

++

[HB]

It's been just over a month. How's the zero dupe doing?


Absolute number of pages : approx 3100 pages according to sitemaps

• Google : http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=s ... com/forums
  pages ( 2,920 )
• Yahoo : http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site:w ... com/forums
  pages ( 8,118 )
• MSN Search : http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=si ... com/forums
  pages ( 257 )
• Altavista : http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q= ... arista.com
  pages ( 8,260 )

I've reposted my original report below. I noted the number of pages reported by google every week:

Google count 6900 (start) > 4000 (four days) > 2100 (10 days) > 2500 (14 days) > 4740 (21 days) > 2920 (one month)

Although Yahoo was the first to display rewritten URLs, Google's counts and results reflect the actual to-date posts more closely. There are crossover periods when both the old and new URLs were listed (4740 @ 21 days). The overall traffic and percentage of traffic coming from search engines hasn't changed during this period.

Report for www.home-barista.com

Date : 02 Feb 2007
Forum URL : http://www.home-barista.com/forums/

Indexing :
Absolute number of pages : 2,461 topics and 29,042 posts, est. 3,000 pages

• Google : http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=s ... com/forums
  pages ( 6,900 )
• Yahoo : http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site:w ... com/forums
  pages ( 7,927 )
• MSN Search : http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=si ... com/forums
  pages ( 203 )
• Altavista : http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q= ... arista.com
  pages ( 8,060 )

Google PageRank

• Google PageRank : 5
• Predicted Google PageRank : same

Search Engine Optimizations :

• mod Rewrite : Advanced 0.2.2 + Zero Dupe
• mx Google Sitemaps : Yes
• mx Sitemaps : No
• Others : Optimized Title, Dynamic Metatags (partial), guest sessions, various mods including own pagination duplicate cleanup

Additional comments

Prior to installing phpbb-seo's mods, I cobbled together SEO modifications from various sites and articles (e.g., in phpbb.com knowledge base). There was no robots.txt rules for the forums in the site's early days and the search engines indexed the viewtopic.php?p= pages; it took a few months for google et al to drop them. Since the zero dupe mod is installed, I've removed that rule, hoping the site may pick up a few more backlinks that were previously ignored.

[dcz]

Really nice

I could not find any duplicate url in Google listing, all using the new mod rewrite standard. But I was only able to browse up to the 11th page since Google decided to threaten people instead of saying they do not want to output all their listing : url

Yahoo and msn still as some older URL listed, but both seem to have already acknowledged the update on many urls.

That's interesting to note the duplicate reduction saved approx 6900 - 2920 = 3980 duplicates, and the most important :

The overall traffic and percentage of traffic coming from search engines hasn't changed during this period.

Another proof of duplicate reduction efficiency, about 4000, more than half, of your web site pages, disappeared without causing any loss in visits. This means that while you had less pages listed, they already started showing up in better position, that's the only way to explain that less possible entries already gives the same amount of search match, thus visitors.

Your web site should end up better indexed, as now, a full crawl means less than half work for SEs than before, and better ranked, as the duplicates will not interfere any more in the rating process.

++

[HB]

I migrated all the viewtopic.php?=p and viewtopic.php?t= references in the posts themselves to the new format. So searching on viewtopics only gives some further insight to Google's updates. Almost all the listed pages have new URLs, but evidently the cache isn't up to date (e.g., this one has no viewtopic.php references in the current text, but as of today, Google thinks it does). If you continue to the end of the line, you'll also see unmapped URLs and interestingly enough, they're all in the Supplemental Result pages. Evidently Google's SR pages don't get any respect from the crawlers.

I think a lot of those dupes that fell out of the index were viewtopic.php?p= references. I blocked them many months ago and Google responded by removing the content, but they'd still show up in the page counts. That explains why there's no significant change in traffic despite a few thousand less "pages" - they were empty pages. Why Google keeps them around once they're listed in robots.txt is beyond me. According to the robots.txt, it should be treated as "not found". Probably because experience has shown that webmasters often make mistakes and might unblock them later.

[ultimatehandyman]

Report for

Date :17-03-2007
Forum URL :http://www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk/forum1/

Indexing :
Absolute number of pages :

• Google : http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=w ... yman.co.uk:
  pages ( 6700 )
• Yahoo : http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.ul ... yman.co.uk:
  pages ( 1900 )
• MSN Search : http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=ww ... yman.co.uk:
  pages ( 118 )
• Altavista : http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q= ... yman.co.uk:
  pages (1900 )

Google PageRank

• Google PageRank :The main site PR is 4 and the Forum PR is 3
• Predicted Google PageRank :4.4 for homepage- unknown for forum

Search Engine Optimizations :

mod Rewrite : Yes (advanced mod rewrite)

• mx Google Sitemaps : No
• mx Sitemaps : No
• Others : No.

Additional comments

I have only just noticed this thread and so the dates are a little out. The advanced mod rewrite has really worked well. I am hoping to get the meta descriptions mod added next!

[dcz]

Looks like you quite above what you believed : http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=s ... uk/forum1/
gives 10,500 listed urls for the forum

Could not find an old url listed there too.

So it really looks like your migration is a complete success

A nice one to install would be the optimal title mod, really helps out and easy to install.

++

[ultimatehandyman]

Looks like you quite above what you believed : http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=s ... uk/forum1/
gives 10,500 listed urls for the forum

Could not find an old url listed there too.

So it really looks like your migration is a complete success

A nice one to install would be the optimal title mod, really helps out and easy to install.

++

This is definately a great success

Pages today in the search engines are-

Google 10800
MSN 162
Yahoo 2595

These mods have definately made the forum get more hits from the search engines. The mods are truly awesome

I will check out the optimal titles mod

[matrix37a]

Thank you i will get back ...

برامج شباب سوفت

[ultimatehandyman]

The meta tag mod has been installed on 05/05/2007 and so we will see if this has any effect

I have not had time to check out the optimal titles mod yet!

[dcz]

It's really easy to install, really, and really makes a difference too

[acapellas4u]

Ok so here it is then dcz et all nearly a year on, an update on the thread that I really enjoyed being involved with last year. It's going to be really interesting to run all of these results and update this post again.

Regards,

Oh for all those interested in me previous stats, click here

Report for Acapellas4U

Date : 26th Jul '07
Forum URL : http://www.acapellas4u.co.uk/

Indexing : www.acapellas4u.co.uk and acapellas4u.co.uk/

Absolute number of pages : 21442 topics & 122597 posts

• Google : http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=s ... as4u.co.uk
  pages ( 10,800 )
  http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=s ... as4u.co.uk
  pages ( 12,200 )
• Yahoo : http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site:w ... as4u.co.uk
  pages ( 57,312 )
  http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site:acapellas4u.co.uk
  pages ( 84,132 )
• MSN Search : http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=si ... as4u.co.uk
  pages ( 186 )
  http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=si ... as4u.co.uk
  pages ( 216 )
• Altavista : http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q= ... as4u.co.uk
  pages ( 47,400 )
  http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q= ... as4u.co.uk
  pages ( 73,700 )

Google PageRank

• Google PageRank : 5
• Predicted Google PageRank : 5

Alexa Ranking

• Alexa Ranking : 98,173
• Predicted Alexi PageRank : unknown

Search Engine Optimizations :

mod Rewrite : Basic php2 rewrite

• mx Google Sitemaps : No
• mx Sitemaps : No
• Others : No.

Additional comments

• Most impressive SERPS boost is from AltaVista and Yahoo. Yahoo must be due to the fact that I have an Overture account and have had for several months now. Is that a fair assumption?
• I hope you enjoyed the stats & effort put into bbcode

[dcz]

• I hope you enjoyed the stats & effort put into bbcode

A lot

From 3900 to 10 800 indexed pages in Google, you must have gone through some increase in referrals.

Though, you still did not installed the zero duplicate, and should really think about the optimal title mod IMHO.
I'm sure it would make a sensible difference in the end

About yahoo and overture, it depends on what did you do exactly. Because Yahoo for sure prefers SEOed site as well

++