Re: SMF & SEO - Archive for SMF

Hi nikolas, I noticed that the search results of Webdigity don't anymore redirect to your forum's archive but goes to the actual thread in the forum. In this thread too, it seems to be using search-engine friendly titles: http://www.webdigity.com/index.php/topic,2433.0.SMF+%26amp%3B+SEO+-+Archive+for+SMF.html

Can you tell us more about this mod that you did and do you think this is stable to use in a live 1.1RC2 forum? Thanks.

Well this mod is almost impossible to share (with the SE friendly urls) as it need a lot of modifications, and I don't remember them all, so I will actually have to write it from scratch to share it...

Anyway I don't think that this modification makes any difference regarding search engines.

Yes it does. Some weeks ago, I was trying to check whether your threads do come up in search engines. I saw that the threads in your SMF Archive came up as search results.

Then I think you made some changes to the URLs and now they appear in the search results as links to actual threads. I tried searching for a thread I made here last week and surprise it's now in Google! My forum however has been existing for more than 6 months now and NOT EVEN ONE thread appears in Google!

Good job on this mod, hopefully you can find time to share it. :)

Wait a sec. The search results from the forum is from google, not from SMF's search engine.

Maybe you missunderstood that?

No, what I'm saying is the topics of this forum appear as search results in Google, which of course is a good thing considering that only very, very few SMF forums appear in Google. We already have a discussion here: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=112100.0 I've kept on pointing out that SMF forums don't normally appear as search result in Google, but the Webdigity forum luckily is in Google.

Yeah, I worked a lot on that, and the archive script is one of the "weapons".

The archive helps search engines to "map" the content inside your web site. As the forum has many inrelevant information (user information, shoutboxes, etc.) that makes the search engines don't understand exactly what every topic is about, while the archive displays only the thread's content with a link to the actual content.

BTW I have posted some tips in this forum, and I will post more later, so stay tuned ;)