UPDATE

I am getting an error message when I try to go to any of the new rewritten page links like this: "page not found or doesn't exist"???

I know that apache mod_rewrite is enabled by my host.

Well, 404 suggest .htaccess issue, but we'll talk about it in a more suitable topic, as we're really off topic in this one

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dcz wrote:Well, 404 suggest .htaccess issue, but we'll talk about it in a more suitable topic, as we're really off topic in this one

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Hi, great work on this mod. Sorry for posting in the wrong area. I just wanted to follow up. I figured out my problem. I thought I had phpbb installed in the "root", but I had it installed in the "/folder". So I just reuploaded the proper .htaccess file and voila! it is working.

Had another question about the dynamic meta tags, but I figured it out.

These dynamic tags are great. Titles and keywords are much better now.

But something your mod doesnt provide which i'm looking for is a dynamic description which is taken out of the current topics body. E.g A post from the topic used for the meta tag description.

Would be a great addition imo.

Not necessarily :
http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-s ... .html#2935

dcz wrote: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".

And the way phpBB is coded would mean adding quite some process for just meta tags (would mean to strip all tags and bbcode in addition to query for the post content).
And, even if we'd go for it, I'm not convinced this would be any better SEO wise. In the 90's maybe
At least in comparison with a decently moderated forum where each forum is named using well selected keywords and topic posted in the right one.
This way, even if the topic title is really poor, the forum keywords will still add weight on what should be the most important.


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dcz wrote:And the way phpBB is coded would mean adding quite some process for just meta tags (would mean to strip all tags and bbcode in addition to query for the post content).

Since Google shows the description if no query words are present, I excerpt the first few sentences and strip out tags. Yes, I know it's window dressing. As an aside, I noticed that one of my articles had the description = the title. Google then ignored it and instead pulled it from the main body (not doing a great job of it either). Whether it matters for SEO is another question; all recent articles I've read on the subject opine that it doesn't matter.

When doing a google search on my site i noticed that some of the topics cached before i played around with meta tags actually had part of a post from the topic as the description. But i dont understand why the crawler only did that for some topics and not others? What i do know is that when i used dynamic meta tags for title and keywords, those dynamic meta tags were used for all topics that were changed since installing this mod.

over at phpbb.com when viewing source their description tag looks like this:
<META content="" name=description>
And when doing a google site seach of phpbb.com they have part of a post from the topic used for the meta tag description. And this is for all topics. So i wonder if to achieve that you dont have to modify code but simply leave content blank for description tag?

Oh yeah one more question, is their a way to get google to re-cache your whole site so that search results reflect the new dynamic meta tags?

buncos wrote:So i wonder if to achieve that you dont have to modify code but simply leave content blank for description tag?

My guess is that lots of overall_header.tpl content reduces the likelihood that google will automatically pick the best leading sentence. phpBB.com keeps such modifications to a minimum, which may explain why its descriptions are correct and yours (sometimes) aren't.

Oh yeah one more question, is their a way to get google to re-cache your whole site so that search results reflect the new dynamic meta tags?

Wait. If your pages are in "supplemental results," wait a long, long, long time...

HB wrote:Wait. If your pages are in "supplemental results," wait a long, long, long time...

There's alot of things i wish i had done when setting up the forum like installnig certain mods first and now i can add this one to the list

HB If possible to tell!

what do you use to layout your main site?

I like very much the simplicity and layout. very easy to follow. do you use rss feeds?

Thanks, the layout is simple because web UI design is not my strong suit. The homepage and articles are handcoded with some php for dynamic content (session handling, banners, list of recent topics on the homepage).

I've experimented with several RSS feeds. dcz is preparing to release his latest Google Yahoo MSN Sitemap And RSS (GYM), which I've been testing for the last couple weeks. It supports caching of the results, which I believe is manditory for any significant traffic. The other RSS feeds I've tried had to serve very short lists (e.g., last ten topics) to keep the performance reasonable. Once cached, GYM's "URLs only" feed serves 100 of the last topics about as fast as the main index page -- that's fast enough for me. I'm still evaluating the digest options; they may be "member only" candidates with some sort of weak authentication.

Hey i noticed your <TITLE></TITLE> tag in overall_header.tpl return same result as <meta name="title"..... tag. This feature isnt included in the "phpBB SEO Dynamic Meta Tags" mod.

I'd like to know how you did this as it's a great feature to have for my site.

tia

*update*
never mind i figured it out

Was the otpimal title mod

Thanks