David
11th Apr 2005, 12:10 pm
One of the things that has bugged me for a while is that fact that phpBB forums are almost invisible to search engine bots. Most bots tend to ignore dynamic pages but the real killer with phpBB is Session Management where a bunch of code is added to each page URL, preceeded by a "?" (SID). The idea is that the forum can track the movement of users and can prevent access to unauthorised areas - so it's quite important - in fact, fundamental to the way the forum works. The Google bot effectively ignores anything after a "?" and so pages with content cannot be reached. This forum uses a similar system - look at the address bar above.
There have been various attempts to make phpBB more friendly to bots but I have yet to come up with an ideal solution. There is a major mod (http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132-0-asc-0.html) for SEO but the changes it makes are so profound that I'm not even going to think about it (in view of all the other mods I have installed). Also in view of the fact that it requires access to some Apache settings that Fasthosts do not allow (mod_rewrite). This enables the mod to create static HTML URLs from dynamic PHP pages.
Recently I thought I'd found a simple solution. A mod that generated a sitemap using topic titles. This seemed like an easy way to at least get topic titles indexed. Sadly, the author of this mod had not realised that simply creating a sitemap from a MySQL query and dumping it on a page would cause session management problems. In phpBB, a dynamic page cannot exist outside of session management without throwing up errors. So I added my own code to handle session management - fine it worked. Oops! Catch 22. Now the page cannot be indexed :">
So, the current solution is to leave the dynamic site map where it is for forum users but to use the generated source code to create a static HTML page that I can link to from the CADTutor home page. Unfortunately, I need to do this manually every week or so but it should work.
Fortunately, the next version of phpBB will address this SEO problem but it's unlikely to appear until 3rd quarter 2005 and even then it probably won't be ready to install untill new updated mods have been made available (phpBB 3 will be a major change and no existing mods will be compatible :( ).
Perhaps this is the solution (http://blog.bluedistortion.com/2004/11/12/phpbb-seo/) :D
There have been various attempts to make phpBB more friendly to bots but I have yet to come up with an ideal solution. There is a major mod (http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132-0-asc-0.html) for SEO but the changes it makes are so profound that I'm not even going to think about it (in view of all the other mods I have installed). Also in view of the fact that it requires access to some Apache settings that Fasthosts do not allow (mod_rewrite). This enables the mod to create static HTML URLs from dynamic PHP pages.
Recently I thought I'd found a simple solution. A mod that generated a sitemap using topic titles. This seemed like an easy way to at least get topic titles indexed. Sadly, the author of this mod had not realised that simply creating a sitemap from a MySQL query and dumping it on a page would cause session management problems. In phpBB, a dynamic page cannot exist outside of session management without throwing up errors. So I added my own code to handle session management - fine it worked. Oops! Catch 22. Now the page cannot be indexed :">
So, the current solution is to leave the dynamic site map where it is for forum users but to use the generated source code to create a static HTML page that I can link to from the CADTutor home page. Unfortunately, I need to do this manually every week or so but it should work.
Fortunately, the next version of phpBB will address this SEO problem but it's unlikely to appear until 3rd quarter 2005 and even then it probably won't be ready to install untill new updated mods have been made available (phpBB 3 will be a major change and no existing mods will be compatible :( ).
Perhaps this is the solution (http://blog.bluedistortion.com/2004/11/12/phpbb-seo/) :D