Forums and SEO

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Today I decided to make a SEO modification to the forum.

Let me explain what this is. As you may have noticed all of the forum softwares in the market use this syntax for their urls :

/showthread.php?topic_id=XXX

The problem with that is that the most search engines and Google especcially, pay attention to the file name of the url. I mean they get as keywords the words contained in the url.

So I suppose that it would be better to make the urls look like :

/showthread.php?topic_id=XXX.Topic_title

As you can see I have allready made this modificaition to the forum, and I will wait for the results.

Have anyone here done this before? I think that there are allready made mods that do this in Vb and phpBB, but in SMF I had to code it myself.

Do you think there are other SEO modifications that can be done to help a forum besides this?

It will be interesting to see the results.  I'm always looking for ways to increase my PR and indexed pages.

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Yeah, me too

Today the google bot visited the site, so I suppose in the next two weeks the first results will be ready.

I will let you know.

Nice mod.

But it is not implemented to the whole of the site.

eg. when I see the last messages it won't show the new urls.

Maybe you should code it a little more

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Nice mod.

But it is not implemented to the whole of the site.

eg. when I see the last messages it won't show the new urls.

Maybe you should code it a little more

You are right. I will finish this later.

I added the same mod to my forum.

I have noticed some more pages being indexed, but its not because of the mod. Until google comes in and your pages all get absorbed, it wont help much. Afterwards though, from what friends have told me, this is one of the most effective mods you can find.

I will be adding this to my forum as well once I upgrade to the latest version.  I use IPB so I had to use the mod called FURL (Friendly URLs).

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Finally the results seems to be very good.

Even that Google hasn't been updated the whole of the new urls, it sends more traffic to the forum, plus we've got some better rankings.

For example we rank first in the keyword cpc campaign , and before that the same thread wasn't getting any traffic from G

How did you program the links to be SEO compatible?

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How did you program the links to be SEO compatible?

I am not sure what you are asking here. I've just added a small piece of code that will add the topic's title somewhere in the url without breaking the allready existed variables.

What I mean is what code did you use, and where did you insert it?

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Oh. That's really difficult to say because I have changed a lot parts of the coding in the SMF for this.

The most important is a function inside the /Sources/Subs.php file, but I do not remember what I've changed.

I used to track the changes that I make to the forum's software, but after the zillion change in the code I stop doing that

Well, looks like I'm on my own. When I figure it out, I'll make sure I post a tutorial explaining what I did.

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That's what I should do at first place, but I didn't....

I will give you a small tip that I remember from this customization.

You should create a function in your Subs.php like this :

Code:

function myurlencode( $txt )
{
return str_replace("%2F", "/", urlencode( $txt ) );
}

and use this function when you are encoding the titles inside the links, because it will not work for all SMF installations and web servers otherwise.

Thanks for that tip, it should help.

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U R welcome

Would you consider your mod a success?

I think SEO 1.0.7 has a problem with Google and I don't think this mod or any other mod found on this site have fixed it.  Without a doubt, this site is the best example of SMF I've ever seen.  Very impressive!

However, it's threads do not appear to be showing up in Google.

I did a search on   "Forums and SEO"  (with quotes) and this site didn't show up in the results.  It appears that SMF 1.1 RC2 does appear to show up when searching for thread titles in the Google...at least it worked on the simplemachines.org forum.

Any thoughts?

Brandon

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Right now we can't really talk about results, as the last google update was a total mess. I think it helps, but I don't think is too important.

I guess the results would be best later. Something I found lately regarding SEO and google, is that it gives weight to the profile pages.

Let me explain. In every post in a thread there is a link to the poster. That means to Google that the profile has more weight as it is crosslinked by the whole site. My first solution (I hope) to this is to make all the profile links javascript, so I will wait for the results.

Good point.  After a massive Google update, it probably isn't a time to jump to conclusions.

Also good point about the profiles.  The fact that every page of the forum has links to the profiles, it makes sense that they would get spidered.  Could we assume then that the highest poster's profiles should theoretically rank higher?

Brandon

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Could we assume then that the highest poster's profiles should theoretically rank higher?

No. I think that the most non-common usernames get the best rankings. In any way this is not good. I hope the javascript will elliminate this problem

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