Making your Smf forum as SEO friendly as possible? How to Tips

[rd]

*headdesk*

There is nothing SEO worthy in vB, they provide the same stuff that SMF does but in SMF those features must be add on by mods.

[Kindred]

meko,

what the heck are you talking about?   First of all, what are you calling "seo", second, what are you using to compar 10 out of 10 or 0 out of 10?

Search engines scan, catalog and rank SMF content just fine with or without any of those silly pretty url or SEO/SEF mods.

And what do you consider to be "the important stuff"?  because I feel that the work our current devs are doing is "important stuff"

[gisfreak]

i think the most important thing is the content itself,

all seo thingy will be useless if your content just copy and paste from another sites

am i correct 

[shri]

I think for making SEO friendly you want some fresh content and  SEO methods that will make as smf forum as SEO  Friendly.

[briangillet]

yes thats true after all Content is King

[charendy]

content is really king...... Copy, modify and paste .... To avoid -10 ranking from google

[dabears]

Content is very important followed closely by quality relevant links. Search out other relevant forums and get natural links back via blog posts, forum posts etc.

[damnitmike]

I try to keep up with SEO as best as I can..it's been awhile since I read over this...

Google actually has a pretty big forum with help from some of Googles people with providing answers....

You gotta realise, search engines WANT your site listed. It's not like it used to be years ago. It makes their search engine more favorable. While they try to improve their search engines, they will tell you what gives them problems, or what works better with it...

Such things as conical urls......Google doesn't like identical pages of content and will drop one. So if your using www.you.com as your sites addy, and Google dropped it in favor you.com (no www and identical content),  then obviously its ranking, www.you.com,  is not going to be good...

You can do the redirect of www.you.com with a simple meta tag or use htaccess.

I guess I'm saying  don't forget to  try sites like Google with help for their search engines...

[青山 素子]

Such things as conical urls......Google doesn't like identical pages of content and will drop one. So if your using www.you.com as your sites addy, and Google dropped it in favor you.com (no www and identical content),  then obviously its ranking, www.you.com,  is not going to be good...

If Google sees identical content on www and non-www, it understands and will pick whatever version has the most inbound links (I believe). You can change this using their webmaster tools.

SMF 2.0 supports canonical URLs which will help a ton with individual topic pages.

[damnitmike]

I believe you can also show this on your sites sitemap also.....

Thanks for the 2.0 info, I wasn't aware it supported the conical issues...

[Kindred]

ok... term FAIL... canonical...


next, www versus non-www does not make a difference.

[damnitmike]

ok... term FAIL... canonical...
next, www versus non-www does not make a difference.

Thanks for the spelling correction Kindred! It was my 20th hr.....

Not sure what your saying, so I'll go on and make myself clearer, and you can add or take away....

This is from Googles Webmaster Help forums....

=============   Multiple Homepage URL Issues   =============

This means that you have things like;
   http://www.example.com
   http://www.example.com/index.html
   http://www.example.com/homepage.html
   http://www.example.com/default.aspx
all showing the same content/loading the same file.


=============   So why is this bad?   =============

This means that you are showing the same content under numerous URLs.

Google tracks things by their URL.
That means all scores/ranks etc. are based on that 1 URL.
If you have the same content under multipel URLs - you may have your "scores" divided between those URLs, instead of consolidated to a single URL.

Google tries to avoid showing Duplication to it's users.
Searchers do not want to see tons of identical results in the SERPs.

Not a Penalty people, it just picks 1 out of X URLs and shows that.
The one it shows may/may not be your "best" or "strongest" URL - so your rankings may vary/fluctuate ... and if it picks a "weaker" URL - you may not rank at all.


Canonical issues can cause Duplication and result in a weaker site and poor rankings/performance.
Got it?
Good.

Here's the link....it is quite lengthy.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=227a384b1a309ba7&hl=en

They made a video to explain also....
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

I was too damn tired to find the links last nite....I got more if anyone is interested.

[青山 素子]

That still has no application to SMF as version 2.0 actually supports canonical tagging.

Also, Google is smart enough to understand about the www prefix.

[dsanchez]

We have become focused on the topic of robots.txt files, so I would like to expand the discussion and get back to the original titled topic: Making your forum as SEO friendly as possible. Here are the steps I've taken so far:

I have followed your steps very carefully and today I have about 200 Guests in my forum plus the common 15-20 users active. I don't know if those are crawler-bots or "real users", but is good anyway I think.

Now I have a couple of questions:

1) In Google Webmaster it shows as crawl error this:

http://mysite/index.php?action=search
URL restricted by robots.txt

However, this is normally restricted in robots.txt, am I correct? Should I allow the robots access to this?

2) When I check "Who's online" I always find someone (I guess is a bot crawler) trying to "Report a topic to a moderator". This is because guests are allowed to report. How can I prevent crawlers of trying to index this?

Thanks!

[青山 素子]

1) In Google Webmaster it shows as crawl error this:

http://mysite/index.php?action=search
URL restricted by robots.txt

However, this is normally restricted in robots.txt, am I correct? Should I allow the robots access to this?

It's a non-content page, so you can safely restrict it. In fact, it's recommended.

2) When I check "Who's online" I always find someone (I guess is a bot crawler) trying to "Report a topic to a moderator". This is because guests are allowed to report. How can I prevent crawlers of trying to index this?

You could block the reporting action in robots.txt or remove the option for guests to report things.

[dsanchez]

You could block the reporting action in robots.txt or remove the option for guests to report things.

I just did the second. Thanks!

[PatrickForum]

Here are some useful SMF SEO Google Friendly tips

[Kindred]

Actually, that blog post is mostly useless....

URL does not matter.
Metatag description and keyords actually do not matter any more.
Global header and footers??  What use to seo??
H1 tags are properly handled in SMF 2
Your description of the robots.txt I outdated, since SMF 2 handles duplicate content correctly


Basically..   Pointless and misleading...

[PatrickForum]

You are totally wrong by saying this.

Keywords in a URL do matter.
Meta descriptions does absolutely matter (see Google SEO start guide)

Keywords are useless for Google, maybe not for Yahoo! or Bing.
Global headers and footers mod puts extra content to the header or footer of the forum, helping Google to understand what the page is about.

You can block Googlebot from indexing unimportant pages such as ?area= ?wap2= and many others, as stated in that article which I linked to.

Am I right, or not?

[Kindred]

re: URL -   that is from 2009.   It is outdated. None of the search engines care at all about the url structure any more and all of them parse argument style urls just fine these days.

Metatag descriptions ONLY matter for what the user sees as the "stub"/description in google... they do not matter for the search engine itself.

your "blog" indicates it it for improving GOOGLE SEO....   so why are you now mentioning yahoo or Bing?
However, the answer your question:
http://searchengineland.com/sorry-yahoo-you-do-index-the-meta-keywords-tag-27743
(read the end - basically, only if no other ranking criteria is present)
And who bothers to use Bing? It's useless.

Global Headers puts the SAME content on every page, thus diluting any page specific content. So, it's actually weakening your page content SEO.

SMF 2.0 already tells google that such content is duplicate by use of the
<meta content="noindex" name="robots">
and
<link href=".........." rel="canonical">
tags, which is more specific than robots.txt and is automatic.


So, basically... nope, you are not right.