Posts from — February 2009

The following are 10 tips that will help you get better search engine placement with PHPbb(available for free here: http://www.phpbb.com/).

1) Remove the “View Latest Post” icon and link on index.php

This is a page rank drain issue. The link is restored but the image is removed because it makes the page too “busy” and because the images are not as attractive as the text link we will subsequently create using the last post date.

2) Make the date of the last post link to the last post like the icon did on index.php

3) Unlink the username of the last post on index.php

As explained above the latest post link is now accessed from thelatestt post date. There are a few reasons for this. First of all a text link is almost always better than an image link. Secondly the text link will change (as the dates change). This makes the link more attractive to search engines but most importantly it provides a slight chance at more keyword traffic by branding the link with a date and time as a keyword.

The links to the profiles are also not the focus of the site. Most users are not searching the internet for information in your users’ profiles. So this helps direct the search engines to the content on the topics instead of the many other links search engines could follow.
4) Remove listing of moderators on index.php

This is a MOD by John Abela. It removes the listing of moderators on the index page. This helps make the page less “busy” and also helps direct the spiders toward the content and not the profiles. It reduces the index page’s queries by 2, so it also helps improve forum speed a bit.

5) Remove session IDs for all search engine spiders

This is a crucial part of this mod. It is based on code that was posted by a user named Darlantan but it is unclear who wrote the original snippet.

This code removsessionion IDs for all guests. This means ALL spiders can spider your forum without session IDs in the URLs.

NOTE: This means you can’t enable guest posting to your forums. It won’t hamper guests in any way other than disallowing them to post. phpBB recently improved security with their session IDs so this code strikes a perfect balance between session ID integrity and search engine spidering.

6) Unlink the username of the last post on viewforum.php

This is purely for page rank drain and to direct the search engine spiders to the content. Pages with too many links are penalized by some search engialgorithmsyms. The links to the profiles are also not the focus of the site. Most users are not searching the internet for information in your users’ profiles. So this helps direct the search engines to the content on the topics instead of the many other links search engines could follow.
7) Remove the “View Latest Post” icon and link on viewforum.php

This is a page rank drain issue. The link is restored but the image is removed because it makes the page too “busy” and because the images are not as attractive as the text link we will subsequently create using the last post date.

Make the date of the last post link to the last post like the icon did on viewforum.php

As explained above the latest post link is now accessed from thelatestt post date. There are a few reasons for this. First of all a text link is almost always better than an image link. Secondly the text link will change (as the dates change). This makes the link more attractive to search engines but most importantly it provides a slight chance at more keyword traffic by branding the link with a date and time as a keyword.

9) Unlink the author username on viewforum.php

This is purely for page rank drain and to direct the search engine spiders to the content. Pages with too many links are penalized by some search enginalgorithmsms. The links to the profiles are also not the focus of the site. Most users are not searching the internet for information in your users’ profiles. So this helps direct the search engines to the content on the topics instead of the many other links search engines could follow.

10) Remove signatures for guest views

This modification removes repetitive text from the topic pages. As signatures are text that is not usually relevant to the topic they distract search engines dilutelute the key words. This makes the signatuinvisibleible for guests so that search engines (and guests!) focus on the content of the topic. it also helps if you allow users to put links in their signatures as you will not lose any page rank through these links anymore.

1. Permalinks – changing your Wordpress permalinks to be search-engine friendly. To change the default link type, go to options->permalinks.

2. Create a Sitemap – A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. The sitemap file is supported by many search engines, including google. A free plugin is available here

3. Improve the titles of your articles – Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization. A free plugin is available here that can help you optimize your titles.

4. Site Submissions – Submit your articles to directories and RSS feed sites. A good site is onlywire.com. Here you can submit your blog articles to multiple social bookmarking sites at a time.

5. Tagging & Meta Keywords – implementing tags on your blog and how to use them as meta keywords. This plugin. Adds you to easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog entries.