With the advent of Wordpress and other arrays of blogging softwares, poor old forums have lost their charm. 3 years earlier, PhpBB was the most used software in forums, almost every webmaster had a forum about something. It was an instant hit since it’s launch because of it’s folksonomical nature, but in a more un refined way as compared to the latest softwares.
One major reason why a forum failed is because of it’s non SEO friendly nature.
With all these problems in front of us, let’s see how we can make the forums (PhpBB mainly) SEO friendly?
- Edit file ‘templates/subSilver(or your template)/overall_header.tpl’
Replace -
<title>{SITENAME} :: {PAGE_TITLE}</title>
with
<title>{PAGE_TITLE}</title>
or
<title>{PAGE_TITLE} :: {SITENAME}</title>
Edit Viewtopic.PHP
Replace -
$page_title = $lang['View_topic'] .’ - ‘ . $topic_title; with
$page_title = $lang['View_topic'] .’ - ‘ . $topic_title;
Including the below code in to your robots.txt will disallow all the unwanted folders from being crawled by search engines.
This way only the necessary information (those in the posts) are available for crawlers and the junk is filtered out.
User-agent: * Disallow: /admin/ Disallow: /db/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /includes/ Disallow: /language/ Disallow: /privmsg.php Disallow: /profile.php Disallow: /search.php Disallow: /templates/ Disallow: /common.php Disallow: /config.php Disallow: /faq.php Disallow: /viewonline.php Disallow: /groupcp.php Disallow: /login.php Disallow: /memberlist.php Disallow: /modcp.php Disallow: /posting.php
Part 2 of this post will follow with more methods on how to optimize your forum software for more search engines.
Related SEO Tips and Articles:
Thanks for the mention.
Patrick
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Thanks for the seo tips. Following through with them now. Hope you don’t mind me dropping a link. haha.
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That’s fine as long as it’s not spam.
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thanks, i’ll try this one, but Mani the “Edit Viewtopic.PHP” are the same to replace with?
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q
Very Interesting…
bb
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Hi
Bye
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Hello,
Great forum!
I found a lot of interesting information here.
Does this forum helpful for you also?
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Those bastards owe me money, they refuse to pay. Good job Shoemoney [img]http://funnycrud.net/thumbs.gif[/img]
Bah, anyway, anyone else have probs with these douches?
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i’m eric. joining a couple boards and looking
forward to participating. hehe unless i get
too distracted!
eric
[Reply to this comment]
Hello
I’ve just registered at the forum. This is my first message.
Please don’t become angry about me.
Thank you.
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I’ve been running a PHPBB forum for years and done a little SEO optimization but this post had a couple ideas I have neglected. Namely the title thingy. I also added a meta description tag to my pages.
Music Critic’s last blog post.. Tusk - The Resisting Dreamer (2007)
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Great topic. Working on including these ideas to my forum now.
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hi every body i am new n got a quick question bout the site.
how can I add a skype chat username to my details page?
thanks ahead of time
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Here is the correct one:
Edit Viewtopic.PHP
Replace -
$page_title = $lang['View_topic'] .’ - ‘ . $topic_title; with
$page_title =$topic_title .’ - ‘ . $lang['View_topic'];
or let it be just $topic_title
Shashank’s last blog post..Honda Develops 3D Processors For Its Asimo Humanoid Robot
[Reply to this comment]
Hi guys,
Please, tell me
information,that is most popular about anything,but only legal and not adult.
Thanks for the info.
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you have a very nice community ,
thank you for the valuable information.
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On phpbb-seo you may download prehacked phpbb3 package for seo using
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Is this gonna end someday??
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Hi:
I am wirting a news article about online shopping sites that are not well known but have excellent value.
What are some of your favorite places to shop online and how would you rate them over:
Amazon
eBay
Overstock
Thanks
Jason
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Thanks!,
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I had gotten off the the wrong foot with my website and I noticed that Google Webmaster Tool stated that I had a lot broken links and duplicate content. Is there anything I should be doing to speed up damage that has been done by having broken links and duplicate content listed even after I had some of the links and stuff removed by Google?
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There is also a Wordpress plugin available for all the wordpress users with PHPbb called PHPbb recent topics.
This will allow you to display a widget on your blog notifying blog viewers of your recent posts in your Forum. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/phpbb-recent-topics/
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