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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Deprecated

Quote from: metallica48423 on August 14, 2008, 07:45:13 PM
i was simply stating that i had no problem with it.  :P

theres a million and one things that could prevent it from working properly and such..  such is the way of this industry :P

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the girls tell me that! ;)

:P ;)

metallica48423

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Dannii

I didn't want an argument either, I just want to find some of those million and one things that prevent my mod from working and fix them!
"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."

Deprecated

Aw let's just duke it out!!! Name your second! I declare antechinus as my second!

No really Dannii, my install just burped. I'm sure it happens all the time with every mod. And again, I commend you on a great, fearless job of programming compounded by a foray into the .htaccess file!

Sheesh, I've spent hours, even a full day developing several lines of Apache directives. That stuff is HEAVY!!!! :)

I pride myself on having a finely tuned .htaccess file. Almost every day I learn more about .htaccess. More people here at SMF forums should endeavor to understand and use their .htaccess file. I've already helped a few n00bz and I'm willing to tackle more .htaccess problems. I pore over the new posts every day wondering if .htaccess would help them.

Of course if your site doesn't run Apache then all bets are off. Yay, go Apache!!! :)

Dannii

Well I want to get my mod working on other httpds eventually... some of them have rewrite engines, but I might move the processing into PHP instead. This is how wordpress does it.
"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."

Deprecated

Just FYI Dannii my site runs Apache 1.3.34

I still think my install just burped. No reflection on your mod. Again, a masterful programming job!!! :)


God, I just L*O*V*E the Apache Rewrite engine!!! :) :) :)

confusion

Quote from: karlbenson on August 08, 2008, 10:17:00 AM
QuoteLike it or not, the presence of keywords in a URL is material to the weighting search engines (even Google) give to a page

The presence of keywords in the link bears no effect towards pagerank. (source google).
They might however come into play as general keywords on the page where they are linked.

You are 100% correct - keywords in a URL does not improve or hurt PR.  Anyone who claims otherwise does not understand what PR is.  PR is not relevant for a key word, it is a ranking given to a page, based on how authoritative Google calculates that page to be. 

Anyone that is well familiar with SEO will tell you that PR is not all that valuable an attribute of a site.  What is really valuable to the site owner is the SERP for target keywords (essentially where your site will fall in the results for a given keyword).  So, keywords in the URL are not useful in the determination of PR, but keywords in the URL are important in the SERP for a given keyword. 

So, if you have 2 identical sites, with identical content (excluding for a moment any theorized duplicate content penalty), same back links, etc, but one had standard SMF urls, and the other had pretty URLs, the site with pretty URLs will rank more highly for a keyword, where the keyword appears in the URL.  That is all I am trying to assert about pretty URL's. 

Dannii

I don't think that's correct. What matters is the link texts. So pretty URLs will help, but only when the URL itself is used for the link text.
"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."

Sickthing

Quote from: karlbenson on August 04, 2008, 04:37:57 PM
Re robots.txt
and
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?action*
Disallow: /*sort=*
Disallow: /*msg*

* for use in the disallow line is NOT supported by most search engines (other than Google,Yahoo) [msn does not support it for one.]
* at the end of the disallow line is unnecessary as it is IMPLIED (the implied at the end is supported by all robots, which for the reason about is the reason why its better not to specify them if you can.

My robots.txt can be found
http://www.youposted.com/robots.txt
I have different sections for different robots and based on the parameters that each can support.
- Yahoo is too aggressive so I limit it to everything but topics.
- Google I allow free reign

Karl,

If you have your site setup in as a subdomain, is it okay to put the robots.txt in the directory of the subdomain?
And a separate one for the main domain? 

Or only one.

Thanks

Deprecated

No it is not. Generally speaking robots look only in the / folder for the robots.txt file.

You should read this page: http://www.robotstxt.org/

Sickthing

Thanks depreciated. 

My problem is I have WordPress installed in the public_html and  the robots.txt file is being generated by the sitemap generator I use.  It is a plugin and does a good job.

Google's webmaster tools allows me to treat them as different sites as do sitemaps and Google Analytics.

I used a free sitemap generator without the robots.txt and I exceeded the 500 URL that the free version of the generator allows.  After putting the robots.txt file in the "home" directory of the subdomain the sitemap generator was able to map the entire board as it used the robots.txt

Maybe my wordpress plug will only append the wordpress portion of the robots.txt file.

If anyone has experience with this, please let me know.  I've gotta do something, what I've been getting with site:domain.com  is a total mess.  :)

I also told Google that the both the domain and the subdomain where there with Google Webmaster Tools, maybe I'll sit on it for a bit and see what happens.

Been a while since I read a tutorial on robots.txt.  I need to do that again, anyone know of a good one?

Deprecated

Sickthing--L*O*V*E your username you sick SOB ;)--I just gave you the URL for the best robots.txt site on the Internet. You sick... sick... heh, lol! Sick is good! ;)

I gotta learn wordpress myself. I just signed on to the management team of a new website, and the owner wants to add wordpress so I gotta learn WTF wordpress is. 'Druther not, but you gotta please the site owners or they get a new team...

Sickthing

LOL you did give me a URL.  I just woke up and totally missed it.  Only two lines how could I miss that.  I think you edited it. :)

I'm a crazed Alice Cooper fan, thus the nick.  Alice wrote a song in the 70's about his fans, it is named Sickthing's  :)

Sickthing

PS WordPress is good for getting good SEO.  I know in the right hands Joomla, SMF, are just as good but I guess my hands are not right.  :)  I do much better with WP.

Deprecated

LOL@Sick Thing. :)

Well if I edited my post, then where's the edit line? ROFLMAO! You just don't want to admit that your reading comprehension is 50%... Or less. ;)

Hey man I'm an Alice Cooper fan too. I attended their 1972 "School's Out" concert! Man that was some kick ass concert! :D It was at the Hollywood Bowl and I just love outdoor concerts. The smoke doesn't get so thick that way. ;)

Sickthing

Me wrong?  I would agree with you but then we'd both be wrong!  LOL

Wow,  you went during the hey day.  I was about 14 in 72.  Didn't start going to concerts until 75, started with ZZ Top.

Hmmm, i prefer indoor so the smoke doesn't clear and I get to re-breath. LOL  Oh wait, maybe that's why my reading comprehension is less than 50%

Check out my guitar. 

Deprecated

Nice ax! :) I used to play... We're taking this technical thread off-topic. Feel free to start a music discussion in Chit Chat. :)

technica

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JonB

@ karlbenson -

thanks very much for sharing your work on your robots.txt. As my SMF projects are the first to be directly advertising supported, I had been looking for such advice. I'm pretty familiar with the right structure for static sites, but knew that the script driven world would be very, very different. I feel at least 2K lumens brighter!

To all who posted, thanks for your insights on SEO and forums

* JonB must now agonize over pretty URLS!

domo arigato

dlackner

Quote from: Deprecated on August 07, 2008, 01:07:49 PM

For my own forum I focus 80% of my attention towards Google. They are actively friendly in soliciting the cooperation of website operators and provide personalized tools that allow you to specify the interaction between the Googlebot and your site, and then provide you with regularly updated feedback on how they perceive your site. Google even allows you to set a sitemap.xml to aid their finding your pages.

Yahoo seems to have found me and they visit fairly regularly, but I've never been able to find any way to get their attention or how to optimize my site to get the best results with Yahoo. They're just like the weather, no point in doing anything about it except being prepared.

MSN? Pfffff!!! They are inscrutable, monolithic, impervious. Besides, who uses MSN search anyway? They can come, they can see, and then they can go conquer some place else. ;)

Since the karlbenson example is no longer available, would you so kind as to post a robots.txt file that I can use for my own forum?

Thanks in advance.

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