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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Kindred

I fail to understand why...   but use the permissions and turn off access to the stats for guests.

View forum statistics - make unchecked.
Слaва
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."

Dannii

Quote from: glennk on February 07, 2011, 06:59:08 PM
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.
If the reverter package doesn't work anymore that's a shame. Maybe someone could update it? It's really a very simple little mod.
"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."

biwan

This was a really wonderful article. Thank you for your provided information.           

Kindred

probably a spammer... but definitely incorrect.

Although there MAY be some (small) worth to descriptive URLs, it really is not all that important in the scheme of things.
Once again... Content is king.
Слaва
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."

richardwbb

Sorry for digging up a old thread, but it is a good one!

I add my €0.02

note that my forum is in a subdomain so you might want to add /forum or so

My robots.txt targetting unwanted urls generated by SMF forum software:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /*?action
Disallow: *;wap
Disallow: *;wap2
Disallow: *;imode
Disallow: /index.php?www
Disallow: /?www
Disallow: /*msg
Disallow: /*sort

So no actions, means no SMF related (no content) links, wap/ imode no text based pages, the ?www should not become indexed, *msg makes Google forget anchored pages, eg, post #2, instead it will read the whole page and store it once, sort also blocked, took me a while to find, one can sort the topics, could appear as different content in Google.

Links I tested against in Webmaster Tools:

http://forum.yourdomain.xx/
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?topic=6706.0
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?topic=6576.15
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?board=2
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php#2
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?board=2;wap2
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?board=2.0;sort=first_post
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?action=profile
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?www
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/?www
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?topic=6576.msg204437#msg204437

The test results of Google Webmaster Tools

Test results
Url    Googlebot    Googlebot-Mobile
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/    
Allowed
   
Allowed
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?topic=6706.0    
Allowed
   
Allowed
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?topic=6576.15    
Allowed
   
Allowed
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?board=2    
Allowed
   
Allowed
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php#2    
Allowed
   
Allowed
http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?board=2;wap2    
Blocked by line 5: Disallow: *;wap2
   

http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?board=2.0;sort=first_post    
Blocked by line 10: Disallow: /*sort
   

http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?action=profile    
Blocked by line 3: Disallow: /*?action
   

http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?www    
Blocked by line 7: Disallow: /index.php?www
   

http://forum.yourdomain.xx/?www    
Blocked by line 8: Disallow: /?www
   

http://forum.yourdomain.xx/index.php?topic=6576.msg204437#msg204437    
Blocked by line 9: Disallow: /*msg

---

I believe this is proper. Did I forget something? It is a 1.x SMF forum

Thanks!
If my post in this topic looks ambiguous to you, then I'm with Murphy's law and General Stupidity. In other words, trial and error.

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