Is this correct SEO syntax: "index.php/board,22.0.html"?

[WTC]

I dont know if this is correct syntax for SEO friendly urls but it has not helped a bit so far.

Can't we have SEF URLs like WordPress. Where catagory and blog post automatically can become the part of url?

I mean it would be hell of a feature if we could change this mod to more meaningful links like. Instead of

http://webmastertradecenter.com/trade/index.php/topic,687.0.html

We may have this

http://webmastertradecenter.com/trade/22-exchange-forum-currency/687-selling-NPbucks-for-Tradeunits.html

or may be a detailed feature where we could control the link format just like WordPress.

I like SMF a lot and love the simplicity of it but was wondering that if we could some how change this feature in next release or have a mod to do so, SMF would be far better placed than VBulletin in SEO aspect as well.

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks!
Chodhry

[Dannii]

Search engines don't have problems with SMF's urls.
SE friendly urls are really people friendly urls.

[WTC]

Search engines don't have problems with SMF's urls.
SE friendly urls are really people friendly urls.

But there must be a reason to call them SE Friendly. No?

BTW, if I turn the SEO ulrs off would it be more friendly to SEs? I mean I dont know how a searchengine would take a url with 2 dots "." and 2 extensions "php,html". For a human it complicates things even further.

Please let me know if this is the correct syntax of SE Friendly urls of SMF? or should I turn them off?

Thanks!
Chodhry

[brandondrury]

While I respect all the coders here who have made SMF my favorite forum script, I'm convinced that there is something about SMF that keeps it from ranking well.  Yes, Google WILL barely spider the SMFforums I've seen, but it doesn't seam to rank these pages very well.  I'm aware of the fact that if you have a powerhouse site such as simplemachines.org, raw PR horsepower can push through SMF's SEO inefficiencies. 

I use Articelive for my articles and tutorials.  95% of all my articles are spidered and show up when I search for their titles.  Of my nearly 800 forum topics, only about 20 of them show up in Google along with a few member profiles (which may be part of the problem..maybe not).  In fact, I could gladly write two very similar articles with equal keyword density.  I could put one in Articlelive and one in SMF within just a few minutes of each other.  I'll put money on which one will rank higher and bring in more traffic in the search engines.  I bet it won't even be close. 

Now I don't know what sort of changes would have to be made to make SMF as efficient with the search engines as say Wordpress or Articlelive, but I feel that this is the one thing (besides a mega high learning curve for template customization) that is holding SMF back from being the best forum script on the planet. 

Unfortunately, after using SMF for 8 months now, my nearly 800 topics and 6000 posts are nearly useless to me.  They aren't bring in any traffic.

Brandon

[Dannii]

Have you locked into the SMFSEO mod?

[brandondrury]

I'm keeping an eye on it.  It is still in Beta mode and I don't really have any sites to test it on at the moment.  It's really tough to test an SEO plugin on a site that doesn't matter because sites that don't matter aren't in the search engines anyway. 

I've actually been watching to see if it can rank in Google as well as other parts of their site.  So far, it hasn't. 

I noticed the same thing with the Archive mod.  It sounds like a great mod, but some of the more active sites that I've seen it used on don't seam to be performing any better. 

Brandon

[SNaRe]

While I respect all the coders here who have made SMF my favorite forum script, I'm convinced that there is something about SMF that keeps it from ranking well.  Yes, Google WILL barely spider the SMFforums I've seen, but it doesn't seam to rank these pages very well.  I'm aware of the fact that if you have a powerhouse site such as simplemachines.org, raw PR horsepower can push through SMF's SEO inefficiencies. 

I use Articelive for my articles and tutorials.  95% of all my articles are spidered and show up when I search for their titles.  Of my nearly 800 forum topics, only about 20 of them show up in Google along with a few member profiles (which may be part of the problem..maybe not).  In fact, I could gladly write two very similar articles with equal keyword density.  I could put one in Articlelive and one in SMF within just a few minutes of each other.  I'll put money on which one will rank higher and bring in more traffic in the search engines.  I bet it won't even be close. 

Now I don't know what sort of changes would have to be made to make SMF as efficient with the search engines as say Wordpress or Articlelive, but I feel that this is the one thing (besides a mega high learning curve for template customization) that is holding SMF back from being the best forum script on the planet. 

Unfortunately, after using SMF for 8 months now, my nearly 800 topics and 6000 posts are nearly useless to me.  They aren't bring in any traffic.

Brandon

I'm thinking same as you.If smf wants to be best forum script in the world SMF coders must work on SEO

[brandondrury]

Improve the SEO and improve the template system.  SMF would completely dominate 100%.

Brandon

[geezmo]

I'll have to agree. Prior to using SMF, I was using vB and although I wasn't using the vbSEO mod, it was indexed by Google. Now that I decided to use SMF, not even one page in my forum  (ok there's one, the forum index) shows up in Google. And to think the Google spider visits my forum everyday. And I've used SMF for more than 5-6 months now.

What should be done:

- Make sure ver 1.1 will be search-engine friendly
- A lot of people, including me, are willing to pay for the SEO mod in 1.1RC2 so whoever the mod is, hopefully can make a working SEO mod ASAP

[Speedyman]

Hello Forum!

I have for normal Browsers like IE or Firefox for Guest URL`s like hxxp:www.300c-forum.de/index.php/topic,72.0.html [nonactive]

But Googlebot indexes URL`s like hxxp:www.300c-forum.de [nonactive] /index.php?topic=21.msg542

What can i Do to change this for Googlebot..?

Best wishes - Speedyman

[Ben_S]

Sounds like it is visiting links it already has in it's database if you recently enabled the queryless urls option.

[Speedyman]

No, I haven´t recently enabled it, it was enabled since first build of the Forum...

[Ben_S]

What version of SMF?

[Speedyman]

SMF Version 1.1 RC2

[Ben_S]

What does your access log show when google is hitting your site?

[Speedyman]

My Access-Log shows also the URL`s without .html

You can also self try to spider the site with hxxp:gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go [nonactive] and click to Source-code View...
This shows you how a Bot sees the Site...
The Forum put`s out the URL´s without *.html

[Ben_S]

The first visit will show none seo links (to none robots) to see whether cookies are enabled.

Assuming the useragent googlebot / slurp msnbot etc is sent, then it will show the queryless urls.

[Speedyman]

Thanx Ben - I think also...

So it`s better to change the SMF-Script to sent allways queryless URL`s.
How can I change the Script - I found no answer anywhere...

These changes are very important because of SEO...

Ssorry about my worse English 

[Ben_S]

No, it's like that by design.

When someone without an existing session visits,
- SMF checks the user agent to see if it is a known spider
- If it is a known spider, then it shows queryless urls.
- If it isn't, then it's likely to be a visitor so it shows standard url's with the session ID in the querystring so it can check if the client supports cookies, if they support cookies, then the session id is stored in the cookie and queryless urls shown, if not they have standard urls with the session in the querystring, this enabled them to still login.

What does your accesslog show when googlebot is crawling your site?

[Speedyman]

For example:

66.249.72.13 - - [20/Aug/2006:15:52:32 +0200] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=991b70881f1e2c8c6a538de671ef6573&action=search;advanced HTTP/1.1" 200 17243 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +hxxp:www.google.com/bot.html [nonactive])"
or
66.249.72.13 - - [20/Aug/2006:15:53:14 +0200] "GET /index.php?topic=125.msg510 HTTP/1.1" 200 27496 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +hxxp:www.google.com/bot.html [nonactive])"
or
66.249.72.13 - - [20/Aug/2006:15:55:56 +0200] "GET /index.php?topic=39.msg%25msg_id%25 HTTP/1.1" 200 60894 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +hxxp:www.google.com/bot.html [nonactive])"