Hi, I hope this website/forum in general provides help for optimizing forum pages.

Where can we get help to learn to optimize (SEO) other than forum pages.
I know there are many websites out there but I thought since you are deeply involved in this you might be knowing few good forums that can help.

The reason behind asking this question is that, by going thru some SEO mod rewrite technique I had altered my .htaccess file and the links (around 5-6 months back ), I changed females.php page to female-models.html using mod rewrite in .htaccess and I feel after that my ranking has actually suffered. So I just want to double check on that.

Any help wud be appreciated. Thanks.

Here is a good place to ask for some help.

This project is not only dedicated to SEO phpBB.
The principles are the same for a web site or a forum, it's only the strategy that could be different, because a forum is a web-site of a specific type.
Actually, I think it's not even a matter of forum or CMS or whatever type of script you may use to host your content. It's content to be the most important.
A forum is just a tool to organise it and to allow interaction with users.

For sure, things will be easier to understand for our community when we'll start posting general articles and such. We miss general views so far, but most of the principles you can learn while Search Engine Optimizing you forum is true for your website.

I started a bit in the magic seo url thread to clarify things :

Search Engine Optimization relies on :

1. Content :
   There is now way to Search engine Optimize a site without content.
   Looks stupid to repeat this, but content is always what comes first in the end. I mean, only pages with structured and following a defined topic will have reliable search engine results, that will last in time. All pages attempting to do more SEO than content will be one day or the other penalized by search engines.
   Content is the number one matter for a web site, even if only providing online services, such as mail or dns look-up, or even Google (eg few forms and barely no text), theses services should be well commented somewhere in the web site for them to be findable under more than just their name as a search query.
2. Linking :
   Both internal and external.
   Links are our only tools to make our content findable. No link, no page views.
   That's why this is what comes second in Search Engine Optimization Priority. And where comes mod Rewrite as well.
   So what we want here first is a good URLs standard. Mod rewritten URLs are better for sure, but not everything with it is better.
   As it is already said in this thread, there would be no point to end up with title injected URLs if we'd only have topic titles like this : "oh it's so wonderful, I can't believe it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!".
   This is not something I tell for others to follow, I do prevent topic title injection here on this site for regular users.
   Then, once you have chosen the best mod rewrite solution for you, you need to work on having many links to your content, both coming from your site and from others.
   You must as well work on having the less duplicates as possible, if not none, as well as the fewer useless links (like posting for phpbb forum, it's not SEO useful, but is a must for users so)
3. Code :
   You need your site functional and your HTML output to be the cleanest as possible.
   You want fast page load and low server load. There is a lot to say about the ending html code and page loading time, they are essential for both Search Engine Ranking and user experience.
   To me user experience comes first compared to super optimized html output, because I am not developing nor writing for bots, but this is very important for sure to care about this.
   HTML optimization just need to be done according to the means and effort you'll be ready to put in your templates.
   Not really cool if you end up with a great SEO template but reluctant to users. For sure the best is if you managed to only use divs and lists to build your page. But, as every web site should look different, there is no final answer to this.
   When using php scripting, you need it to work fast, and even more when it comes to SEO mods, because you as well want to keep resources for users, which are not really caring about URLs, but more about content, styling and page loading.

These advises are generally true. SEO is all a matter of working on what are your projects strength and weakness according to those.

I am pretty sure the precise problem you mention is just the result of an improper redirection.
HTTP 301 is the only way in such case.

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OK thanks , so that means I can clarify my SEO doubts for any of my website be it a blog, forum , CMS etc. Great

So here is my .htaccess file. Can you kindly let me know if the redirections etc. are ok. I optimized my site to change dynamic urls with.php?asdasda&page=bjj et. etc. to some better looking and SE friendly urls. Now I am loosing on ranking, indexing etc.
[.htaccess file Removed by NIMs]

Well, please, one topic at a time.

If you want some help with .htaccess and mod_rewrite, please use our mod_rewrite forum.

About the redirection kind to choose, there is no doubt about it, it should be http 301 as long as the change in url is final.

First thing to clarify before we can see what would need to be changed in your .htaccess is what do you want to do ?

Url rewriting (which links and what pattern) and redirections.

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