Forums and SIDs

Make sure that when you do a mod rewrite on your forum you dont have long sids.  I unfortunately messed up with my rewrite so google spent about an hour crusing my site because it kept getting new SIDs.  I chewed up about 50mb of bandwith just on this indexing but it could have been worse.   ;D

So keep those SIDs out of your urls.

I think there is also a mod for this in phpBB, so if you run phpBB you can avoid mod_rewrite for this job

Yeah I'm on phpbb.  Its all been fixed now but google definitely left its mark with 1 hit on the robots.txt but over 600 pages visited. 

I have also phpBB and use a MOD so that all guests (including search engines) will see "static" HTML pages like www.domain.com/forum-14.html. The MOD can be found at http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132.html

bylla I added that mod.  It helped a lot with the indexing of my sites.

I switched from phpBB to SMF and I had never been happier.  Now, I find that even this forum (using the same version of SMF as I am) is having troulbe with Google.  Don't believe me?

Type this into Google:

"Forums and SIDs"     (the title of this thread)

You get nothing.

Brandon

yes that's true this is about the biggest thread here:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=%22The+crazy+post+contest%22&btnG=Search

it looks like that the forum is not very good indexed: check this one:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=db_cart+scripts&btnG=Google+Search

this thread is linked via my own site...

I think the problem is that Google get links inlcusive a PHPSESSID... and these are lower ranked (maybe?)

and at last, maybe it's usefull to have a google sitemap for every main forum...

This sort of thing scares me to death.  I've worked very hard on my forum when I could have been putting that effort into other, possibly more lucrative, ventures.  If my SMF site can't give me traffic, then there isn't that much need for having it all.

I'm going to think about it a couple of days, but I may just have to switch to vBulletin and buy the SEO mods.  It'll cost me $300, but I figure I can make up for that in about 2 months if my forum can rank anywhere near as well as my articles do.

Brandon

I think that this problem can be solved, the most important thing is to know what is really the problem...

Sure. 

I wish I knew more about the scripting end of things.  I know that very few pages of my forum are getting spidered, for one.  Most of them are pages that have no use in the search engines anyway (like profiles). 

There are guys working on a mod now which is in beta mode.  http://www.smfseo.org/

I'm curious to see if this mod, when ready, can take care of the problem.  Maybe it's an issue with URLs.  I'm not so sure.  I think there is something about the way the core software is written that is causing problems, but I'm just blind guessing and don't know what I'm talking about really.

I think the best type of url is this:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum13/1060.htm

of course creating an URL with the title inside is a good thing too...

The most serious problem with SMF is that it has too many duplicate urls. I mean that you can reach the same page using 4 or even 5 different urls.

Yesterday I've changed that in the board to see what happens. I've also made some other changes to the site as for SEO. It is true that SMF is not SEO optimized as vbulletin is, but it is still the best free forum software so I guess a little work on this wont harm :)


Brandon as I see you are looking for SMF optimization tips, so you will be also interested in this thread ;)

Are there links with multiple URL's?

Yes for example this thread could be reached with these ways :

index.php/topic,874.0.Forums+and+SIDs/topicseen.html
index.php/topic,874.0.Forums+and+SIDs.html
index.php/topic,874.new.Forums+and+SIDs.html
index.php/topic,875.0/prev_next,prev.html
index.php/topic,875.0/prev_next,next.html
index.php?topic=875.0
.......
......

In my opinion this is the biggest problem with SMF and I hope I can fix it soon (Right now I have allready fixed most of them, but it still needs some work)

Ouch! 

This is sort of what I've been talking about in regard to the core structure of SMF not agreeing with the search engines.

Good luck on this one, dude.  I'd be mega interested in any improvements you could make.

Brandon