SEO & Forum?

[Cheese Head]

I've noticed that when I google search for Cheese Making Forum to see if people can find me, they don't but google does show a small Cheese Making board in two other larger non cheese making forums and the link take you directly to that board, avoiding webiste homepage and Forum homepage!

Do Search Engines spider (correct term?) my SMF 2.0 site and posts?

Is there some special trick I'm missing as google finds my website (google Cheese Forum) but never my forum!

Thanks!

[Kindred]

how old is your forum?

Does your forum allow guest reading?

[Cheese Head]

Forum is about 3.5 months old and yes guest's can read.

I notice under Admin > Config > Core Features  there is a Search Engine Tracking switch, but I think that is just to for Administrators and I think shouldn't stop google etc, correct? Should I switch that on?

[Kindred]

that switch should not matter.

Sometimes it can take months to get your forum scanned into google....

[Cheese Head]

I turned that switch on and just checked and it says:

Date Spider / Name / Page Hits
2008-05-09 / Yahoo! / 36
2008-05-09 / Google / 1
2008-05-10 / Yahoo! / 15
2008-05-10 / Google / 6

So it looks like the key google is searching, albeit not very thoroughly, so I just have to wait?

[karlbenson]

Google indexes very slowly.

Just because you have a cheese forum, doesn't mean that you'll rank high for cheese.
Getting indexed well is more than just having a forum about cheese.

You need backlinks. Lots of links on other sites. For Google, backlinks = PR,
which increases high well you'll be indexed.

[Cheese Head]

Thanks Karl for advice, John.

[Cheese Head]

OK, same subject, I went to the other competing forum again (they are using vBulletin) and went to just their single board on Cheese Making and viewed their source code and they have:

<meta name="keywords" content="Cheese Making Forum, beer, homebrew, home brewing, beer forum, wine making, ale, keg, lager, microbrew, bottle, beer reviews, beer news, beer food, beer articles, german beer, brewling, porter, stout, alcohol, cerveza, beer events, beer travel" />

I think this is the reason when you google seach for Cheese Making Forum they show up and as I haven't tailored any SMF meta name data, the reason google doesn't point to me even though I have way more cumulative posts and activity etc. So to try and get google to similarly index me and thus lead people to my forum I'd like to modify my SMF meta name data.

When looking online at my forum homepage, the URL reads http://myforum.com/forum/index.php and when I look at the Source code for that file I see:

<meta name="keywords" content="PHP, MySQL, bulletin, board, free, open, source, smf, simple, machines, forum" />

This must be the default from SMF. I then opened that file directly to modify the meta name data but don't see that code!?

Questions:

• Can I alter the default SMF meta name descriptors?
• Which SMF file should I edit and for even better SEO, can I also edit meta name for a Category and even for each Board like the other forum has done?
• Can I edit these file(s) on my PC and upload and replace OR will that corrupt the database and thus do I need to put the forum into Maintenance Mode and then edit the file(s) online?

Thanks very much for your support!

[karlbenson]

You can edit the metadata in Themes/default/index.template.php
or use the Easy Edit Meta Date mod.

There another mod to do vb style meta information.

Note, meta keywords are not used by the main search engines anymore (not for many many years).
Although it can't hurt.
Content is king.

You edit into an ftp program.

[Cheese Head]

Thanks Karl

OK so I edited just meta name data in index.template.php file on my PC and FTP'd to server. I was hoping there was more places to edit, ie one for each board.

Also OK that Search Engines don't use it to rank you in user searches, but I think they use it if/when they display you to to their user?

I still don't understand why google or live only reports back to their users my website and not the forum it links to, which is where the content really is?

Thanks for advice.

[karlbenson]

If your using smf 2.x
You can also use vBulletin style meta tags

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1138

[NickC]

I still don't understand why google or live only reports back to their users my website and not the forum it links to, which is where the content really is?

Thanks for advice.

You need a sitemap. If you're using SMF2 use this one:

http://wgnrs.dynalias.com/smf2/sitemap.php

Then get a google account and submit your sitemap.

[Cheese Head]

karlbenson, thanks that looks like what I need, when I downloaf the metatags_1.1.zip file it has 4 files in it:

• dbmodify.php
• install.xml
• MetaTags.php
• package-info.xml

Sorry to sound so dumb but what do I do with them? I'm guessing FTP to my host to a certain folder and then while logged into my forum with Admin account go Admin > Configuration > Modifications > Miscellaneous and then install and then modify the metadata? Sorry but no directions on the mod download page.

NickC, thanks, I have a website with a linked SMF2 forum at http://cheeseforum.org/ and I believe already have a sitemap as I FTP'd a file called "sitemap_config.xml" to my root directory in Jan 08 when I first started my website. I submitted my site to google but not sitemap is this different? Other questions:

• Is that file not working and if not should I delete it and replace it with "sitemap.php" into the root directory?
• Will your recommended file work for both my website and SMF or just SMF?
• Anything else I'm missing? Thanks in advance . . .

[Kindred]

cheesehead...    it's a mod package.

Go to your smf admin > packages > download

and choose to upload the ZIP file into the package manager and apply/install the mod

[NickC]

Your sitemap is static and knows nothing about your forum pages. You need to keep that for your main web site, though. Sitemap.php is dynamic, generating a map of your entire forum every time google downloads it. You can have more than one sitemap for a web site, but they must all be in the root directory, so I have a php file in my root directory that points to sitemap.php in my forum directory.

[Cheese Head]

Kindred, sheep for brains me, thanks

• I went Admin > Main > Packages > Download, cut and pasted the URL above got:

  An Error Has Occurred!
  The package you are trying to download or install is either corrupt or not compatible with this version of SMF.

• Tried again but added the file name "metatags_1.1.zip", same error message.
• Downloaded "metatags_1.1.zip" to my desktop and then Admin > Main > Packages > Upload, browsed to the file, SMF said download succesful !
• Then went Admin > Main > Browse Packages where I can see my upload at bottom of screen.
• Clicked Apply Mod and got "Error in Package Installation", Test failed on Themes/default/index.template.php file. I think this is because I edited this file's line 79 <meta name="keyword" after karlbensons proposal posted above.
• So I chose to ignore the Test Failed message and clicked Install Now anyway, ignored the popup warning screen and SMF said package was installed successfully  .
• Found the mod results under Admin > Configuration > Modifications > Miscellaneous where I can now add Meta Description or replace default Meta Keywords that I think are the ones I edited in index.template.php file! (I expected this mode would allow me to give meta data to each post?!).
• In summary, karlbensons direct edit did same but at least I figured out how to install mods, now just have to get google to search my forum . . .

[Cheese Head]

NickC

1) OK thanks, so I leave the static websites root directory file "sitemap_config.xml" as is. As well as initially submitted my website with google here, I can't remember if I submitted this sitemap so I just redid it here. It showed my website as I was logged in but I did it again for safety. Should be OK yes?

2) Next, I need a special sitemap file called "sitemap.php" for google or other search engines to map my forum. If my website was just a forum then this would go in my root directory but because I have a forum within a website it has to go in the forum's directory, and thus I need a little file to direct google et al to look in there for this second sitemap, of the forum. Correct?

3) I've FTP'd "sitemap.php" into my SMF forum directory on my host. Silly question, for non-php programming guy, to save me learning php, what code do I put in a root directory file to point to "sitemap.php" in forum directory and what should I name that file?

Many thanks especially for your patience . . .

[NickC]

I'm away for 2 weeks with only blackberry access to the internet. Could someone else please pick this up, it's not easy replying to things on here!

[Cheese Head]

NickC, thanks for quick reply from your BB

OK so I feel like I'm going backwards:
1) I went to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and looked at google's crawl results and all looks OK except Not Found = 20, so looks like my old sitemap_config.xml is out of date as the 20 pages that google was trying to crawl no longer exist.
2) So I resubmitted my sitemap_config.xml file after which google said error.
3) So after searching in a different forum I just went to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com and generated a sitemap.xml file for my website and forum, FTP'd it to my root directory and told google to use this new file, google says "Status Pending".
4) When I look at the http://www.xml-sitemaps.com generated sitmap.xml file it appears to have indexed first my website and then my SMF forum until it hit a max 500 pages when it stoped and proposed that I buy a desktop version of their software for $20.

Questions:
Q1) Is http://www.xml-sitemaps.com the best way to go?
Q2) Do I really need spend the $20 and index over 500 pages?
Q3) Given that the forum section changes daily, how often do I need to rerun and re-FTP and re-tell google that new sitemap.xml file is ready for it to check?
Q4) NickC says sitemap.php actually generates a new "map of your entire forum every time google downloads it". So is that a better system and I should delete the www.xml-sitemaps.com generated file?

As you can tell by my questions, I am quite lost here, all I'm trying to do is get google to see and index my forum so that anyone searching can find me. Thanks for advice . . .

[confusion]

I use phpsitemapng (http://enarion.net/google/phpsitemapng/) with a lot of luck, and it's free.  I run it nightly on my forums.  You'll find that it hammers the site pretty hard, so for a large forum, you may not want to run it more than once a day or once every few days.