Though many of you will disagree but I strongly feel Google and Yahoo still use meta tags such as "keywords" and "description" along with "Title" tag to rank websites in search results.

I have myself experimented with my website and seen it follow the keywords and description to great importance. There are some sites that use a particular keyword extensively in these tags and are thus rated on the top, even though they do not have much usefull content inside.

So IMHO we shud also concentrate on this very important MOD.

You are right.

Meta tags are not considered enough these days. I mean, it is true once adding the keyword tag was almost enough to show up first in search engine and that now, it's very different, but this is far to mean they are not useful.

Actually, Google does use the meta tags and it's not only a matter of providing with description and keywords tags. When you tell your website is rated "general", and actually tell it's open for indexing, you are in some way lowering the Google responsibility.
I mean, otherwise, it would be only Google to chose how to rate and select a category for your web-site.
It's not really like if they cared, since they claim to index all web-sites, but still, it could become more important to tell such information as the Internet will be more and more regulated.
If you look at this thinking about lows and responsibilities, by adding the index follow tag you clearly give the right to Google to keep copies of copyrighted content from your site in it's cache and, by stating the category, you do not let him alone in taking the "risk" to output results from your web-site to every users.
You say your site is ok for PG 13, then, it's not as much Google's responsibility to have shown this page to someone younger than 18 or 21.

Meta descriptions will be used by Google as a general description of the page for general queries such as : the site command
But it will still be able to show the part of the text matching a more specific query.

What is to avoid is too long meta tags and worst, same Meta's for all pages.

++

So that makes this MOD worth updating
I hope once you are through with your Google Sitemaps MOD ( I guess the most important at this moment ), you might consider working on this MOD so that we all can thank you once again
Keep up the good work buddy.

It's already as is a good enhancement, as all content in meta tags will be actually found in the page.

As well, the title should (I mean, we cannot do much about bad content) contain the most important keywords of the post and be descriptive. With good content quality, this can give us some pretty good and short meta tags which is a good thing.

For example, the idea to grab some part of the first post to build up a description is not this good I think, because a lot of interesting post starts with un-interesting content, such as "hello, so yes you are right, this bla and bla", before the interesting :"now let me elaborate more on this precisely".

Here, the keywords the most likely listed are the one being the most used in the forum being as well being inside the post content (all of it). So if you go through the search table optimizing process and run a well organized forum with good content, you'll end up with very good keywords in the meta tags, as keywords should really be keywords anyway, thus used a lot in the forum.

Besides, if meta are not dead, it's not a reason to go for the absolute perfect meta for all pages, would be useless SEO wise I think.
The important matter here is dynamic, honesty (the content is related to them) and efficiency, few server load for dynamic meta everywhere.

Anyway, I'll update this and will add some more features, but it will not further what is really necessary and useful SEO wise.

++

dcz wrote:

amir abbas wrote:
code of my language is FA not FR
how can i change that part

thanks, very useful mod
i searched a lot for something like this
excellent

Jeez, I forgot about this one, well, not really, but I should have told you can just edit this line

<meta name="description" lang="fr" content="'. $description .'">

I am so french sometime

Hey dcz,

So in this line, if my language is english should I change fr to en?

Code: Select all

$phpbb_meta .= '<meta name="description" lang="fr" content="'. $description .'" />' . "\n";

exactly

After I installed this MOD it appears nothing is showing in my description for my topics. Do you know what I should look for to correct. All I'm getting is

Code: Select all

<meta name="description" lang="en" content="" />

The key words are displaying dynamic though.

Well it should work, could be your editing to have done something, please check, and if not enough, post here the mod's code you've got in page_header.php.

++

Lets make sure I have this right

Code: Select all

$description = $board_config['sitename'] . ' :: ' . $meta_row['forum_name'];
         $keywords = $board_config['sitename'] . ', ' . $meta_row['forum_name'] . ', more keywords here';
      }
      $db->sql_freeresult($result);
          }
} else {
   $description .= 'my description here';
   $keywords = 'my keywords here';
}
$phpbb_meta  = '<meta name="title" content="' . $page_title .'" />' . "\n";
//$meta_str .= '<meta name="author" content=" my author here " />' . "\n";
//$meta_str .= '<meta name="copyright" content=" my copyright here " />' . "\n";
$phpbb_meta .= '<meta name="keywords" content="' . $keywords  .'" />' . "\n";
$phpbb_meta .= '<meta name="description" lang="en" content="'. $description .'" />' . "\n";
$phpbb_meta .= '<meta name="category" content="general" />' . "\n";
$phpbb_meta .= '<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />' . "\n";
//END  www.phpBB-SEO.com Dynamic meta tags

Well yes.

A link would help out to check here.

++

Hi!

First of all: congrats with the job done. It's a great mod with a lot of potential.

I've just installed it and it works great.

However, I have one little remark. I find the "description" tag could be improved.

Now, when viewing a topic in phpbb, this is the generated code:

$description = $board_config['sitename'] . ' :: ' . $meta_row['cat_title'] . ' :: ' . $meta_row['forum_name'] . ' :: ' . $meta_row['topic_title'];

But I've noticed Google (and Yahoo) prefer to display results with a more extended description. Also, an extended description is more attractive for people looking at the search results.

For example, a search on Jacques Chirac (French president - winks at author)

results in:

Code: Select all

Biography - Website of the Office of the French President
Jacques Chirac Born on 29 November 1932 in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. ... Jacques Chirac in his student days Graduate of the Paris Institut d'Etudes ...
www.elysee.fr/elysee/anglais/the_president/biography/biography.39706.html - 29k - In cache - Gelijkwaardige pagina's

So, the first lines of the article are displayed in the description-tag.

What I want to ask: is it possible to suggest me how I could add the first lines of the content of the initial post/topic and display them in the description-tag?

And welcome

Actually, if you look at your example (:lol:) case, the little text selected by Google as a description is not the meta description content :

Code: Select all

<meta name="description" content=
    "Site officiel de la présidence de la République Française. L'actualité du président, ses discours, son agenda, son portrait. Les visites virtuelles du palais de l'Elysée. Les institutions françaises, les symboles de la république, tous les Présidents de la République. Official Website of the Office of the French President, speeches, diary, portrait. Virtual guided tours of the Elysee Palace. French institutions, symbols of the Republic, a complete list of French Presidents. - Elysée" />

The meta description seems to be only used as Google descriptions for generic queries such as site:phpbb-seo.com, and Google is still able to show the part of the content the most related to the search query : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ph ... duplicates

The idea of grabbing the first post content is not necessarily a good one SEOwise and for the server load.
Beside, Google will continue to choose himself the most relevant content to show in the page's description in results pages.

++

dcz wrote:The idea of grabbing the first post content is not necessarily a good one SEOwise and for the server load.

Since you are the SEO-experts, I have no arguments left

dcz wrote:Beside, Google will continue to choose himself the most relevant content to show in the page's description in results pages.

That, I didn't know. I assumed the description in the results pages = the description in the meta tags...

dcz wrote:If I remember well, the problem was only concerning the UTF-8 topic keywords, as you where not able to properly filter words from the search tables according to their size.

So, you could just work with a longer search_stopwords.txt, including one and two letters words, or just disable the keywords for topics, but leave everything else as his for a normal install.

You should just find and delete :

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        $sql = "SELECT w.word_text
                FROM " . TOPICS_TABLE . " t, " . SEARCH_MATCH_TABLE . " m, " . SEARCH_WORD_TABLE . " w
                WHERE t.topic_first_post_id = m.post_id
                AND m.word_id = w.word_id
                AND t.topic_id = $meta_topic_id LIMIT 20";
        if( ($result = $db->sql_query($sql)) ) {
      $keywords = '';
      while ( $meta_row = $db->sql_fetchrow($result) ) {
         $keywords .= ($keywords == '') ? $meta_row['word_text'] : ',' . $meta_row['word_text'];
      }

In the mod's code (page_header.php) and eventually, to prevent empty keywords tags to be outputted find :

Code: Select all

$phpbb_meta .= '<meta name="keywords" content="' . $keywords  .'" />' . "\n";

And replace with :

Code: Select all

$phpbb_meta .= isset($meta_topic_id) ? '<meta name="keywords" content="' . $keywords  .'" />' . "\n" : '';

++

hi again
i tries this one after near one month
it doesn't work
i dont have keyword meta tag for index page and viewforum page and i have empty keyword meta tag for topics after applying this code changes

is it possible for you to work on it after rewrite mod update
i've used search_stopwords.txt file but this file is not work with UTF-8

This is already scheduled