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

Started by dobizo, July 23, 2008, 08:31:15 PM

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PatrickForum

QuoteSimple-to-understand URLs will convey
content information easily
URLs are displayed in search results
(1) A URL to a page on our baseball card site that a user might have a hard time
with.
(2) The highlighted words above could inform a user or search engine what the
target page is about before following the link.
(3) A user performs the query [baseball cards]. Our homepage appears as a result,
with the URL listed under the title and snippet.
Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on
your website can not only help you keep your site better organized,
but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by
search engines. Also, it can create easier, "friendlier" URLs for those
that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by
extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words
.

Let's look what Google has to say about this. Please read page 6 and page 8 of the Search Engine Optimization Guide of Google,
which was released in NOV 2010: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf


Kindred

If you want URLs with words in them for HUMAN eyes, then fine, but do not think that it has any bearing at all on the search engines....

proper LINKS (i.e. title tag, etc) make a difference, but the URL really does not)
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青山 素子

Although it's also from 2009 (it'll be updated soon for 2011), the SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors section is a good starting guide for determining what counts most for a search engine. It's not just a single person's idea, it's based on a survey of a wide selection of SEO professionals.

If you look into the top ranking factors, you'll find that keywords in the URL is in #10 and 11 slots, with only about 37% importance, making it low importance. You'll also find the meta keywords item is in the very bottom slot, below even keywords in HTML comments.
Motoko-chan
Director, Simple Machines

Note: Unless otherwise stated, my posts are not representative of any official position or opinion of Simple Machines.


Arantor

The other thing I find utterly hilarious is the entire concept of search engine optimisation when applied to forums.

When you're in control of every element of the page, content and presentation, you can load it up with this week's fad of SEO if you like (note that Google is rolling out a major algorithm change anyway). But most importantly you can load it up with appropriately weighted, keyword rich content. Which is fantastic if SEO's your thing.

But on a forum, you can't control the content unless you're the one writing it and running it like a blog - your users create the content, and unless you sit and rewrite it post by post, you don't have the ability to control how they write it - which means you don't have the power to make it keyword rich.

Consequently, anything else you do is just tweaking, because the real meat is never being touched.

glennk

Playing about with your urls is not advisable unless you know what you are getting into. I used Pretty Urls mod for around a year. I now regret that choice a hell of a lot. Pretty urls does not a lot for forum seo, whats worse it creates far to many versions of the same page.

I have lots of links pointing to the pretty urls, but now I no longer use the mod all those links count for nothing. Anyone who knows seo knows that links are far more important than anything you can do on your site. Reverting back to the old urls is difficult as the reverter doesnt appear to function, and you must also consider what will happen if the mod developer decides to give up on the mod and not develop it for future smf releases.

Arantor

Well, Pretty URLs' original developer mostly moved on, but made sure that anyone could continue to work on it by ensuring it has a non restrictive licence. And someone took it over.

2.0 handles the 'duplicate' problem a lot better with canonical tags all pointing back to the same 'page'.

coolfx350

I run about 30 SMF forums, and let me tell you Pretty URL is one of the most important things in SEO.  It allows google to crawl every page and give it a unique path. can't live without it.

Kindred

and, that statement, right there, shows how little you know about actual SEO.

Pretty URLs has ZERO, none, nada, NO effect on SEO in the least.

It may have mattered ten years ago...  but with the explosion of php-based software that includes arguments in the URLs, Google and the others all made sure that they can crawl forum urls just fine...  And every message and link in the forum already has a unique path...   the message ID is unique per thread and message within a thread.
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

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redone

What matters most is good content, decent relevant links from other fellow websites.

There is some argument for SEO friendly URL's but Kindred is correct as Google for example can index almost anything these days. Build a good site with visitors in mind first and rankings will surely follow.

How pretty your URL's look is the least of your worries!

~RedOne

Arantor

Actually, the only benefit I've observed from pretty URLs is directly in spite of it itself being added. What I've seen is that folks who start caring about SEO not only add things like sitemaps and pretty URLs but they start taking the time and energy to care about other things - including content. So it ends up being all part of the 'optimisation' process even though it doesn't make any practical difference in and of itself.

PatrickForum

How more descriptive a link is, the better the chance that it will rank well in the search engines on relevant keywords of that particular topic.

Anyone got an idea how to add content to the homepage en subpages of a SMF forum?

Arantor

Yes, that's often true, but how often do you have direct control of what your users post? (Which is why the entire concept of SEO on a forum is more than a little messed up)

QuoteAnyone got an idea how to add content to the homepage en subpages of a SMF forum?

Which home page? Using a portal?

PatrickForum

No, on the normal homepage and on the sub pages (category pages of the boards)
I need to make sure every page has enough content on it.

The only thing I have now are the board descriptions.
That's the only content I have on the homepage.

Quote from: Arantor on March 18, 2011, 01:01:08 PM
Yes, that's often true, but how often do you have direct control of what your users post? (Which is why the entire concept of SEO on a forum is more than a little messed up)

How do you mean? Users can't change the URL of a topic. But if you are the forum-owner and you use descriptive URL's, search engines can better understand the content of your page and users can already see what the page is going to be about.

Kindred

patrick,  The URLs are, as I have already said, pointless.
Pretty urls are nice for people to look at, but the search engines don't care, at all...

The content on the page is what matters...   and on a forum, in posts, you don't get to control the content.

If your site has things like a media gallery, articles, and static pages... then you have control. But over posts?   The only thing you can really do is keep your users focused and get good posts.
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

PatrickForum

Kindred,

You say > content is the only thing that matters on a forum.
Well, how do I get enough content on the homepage and category pages, then?

The only content I have on those pages is the description of the boards. Should this be enough for Google to recognize the subject of the forums and the subject of individual boards? Google recommends to have enough content on all of my pages.

Kindred

forums are tough in that regard.

forum name, board names and board descriptions all help
for internal pages, like posts... make sure you have good posts...    SEO is not something that happens overnight, especially with forums. With forums, you need to BUILD your content.
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

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PatrickForum

I have a question. Which file do I have to edit to add a nofollow atribute to the stats section of the page, which can be found under:
http://www.nameofyourforum.com/stats - thank you.

Kindred

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Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

PatrickForum

I don't want to make that page findable by search engines in the search results and I don't want to flow pagerank to that section and I don't want to let Googlebot crawl this section.

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