SEO for PHPBB

I have had a phpbb board installed on my site for well over 18 months now and although it is a free script and is a great piece of software it is often beaten in the Search engines by sites that use different scripts like vbulletin that create search engine friendly url's.

Recently I came across http://www.phpbb-seo.com/

Which has some extremely good modifications for improving the search engine friendlyness of PHPBB  8)

I have recently had this mod installed on my site - http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/advanced-mod-rewrite-vf46/

This mod has changed all of my sites url's from ones like this-

www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk/forum1/viewtopic.php?t=1670&sid=27d03f3c4dea83b3ccbef658eb0065bb

To ones like this-

http://www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk/forum1/2-way-light-switching-conversion-t1670.html

Both url's take you to the same topic in the forum, but the second url is now much more search engine friendly  8)

This is a really amazing mod and I hope to install some more mods from there soon.

If you have a phpbb board and you wish to improve it's effectiveness in the search engines then some of these mods are a must!

Thanks for sharing that information. phpBB is probably the worst forum software in terms of SEO so I guess this will be useful to other members too :)

Thats a great mod! I have one phpbb forum running and need something like that. I have done some modifications to the software in the past to let the Google bot crawl the pages (the sessionID in the URL made the bot leave the site...) but this URL rewrite will be a nice addition. Thanks for sharing!

Hi Ultimate Handyman,

Us two get around don't we?!!

www.phpbb-seo.com has some excellent and free mods for PHPBB, i've got several installed at www.davidcastle.org, i have to say though PHPBB is still pretty unfriendly interms of on-site SEO, i'm looking forward to a stable release of PHPBB3 as that promises much cleaner and full CSS (No tables!)

I could use this for ChristNet's forums. I want to promote it on the search engines, because I know that a lot of people use search engines to find what they are looking for on the net.