what do I need to know before I launch?

any warning?

[thecleaner]

I'm about launch a highly driven content website. the content is posted by members.

When optimizing a website where you hope to one day have millions of pages, what are some warnings or pro-cations that I should take and prepare for?

thank you in advance.

[rogerd]

Well, think about your architecture and make sure it is scalable. Build logical navigation systems that won't become outdated quickly, and create good URLs now vs. later.

[longen]

What to do about the Keywords and Description META tags is a problem.

[thecleaner]

thanks longen.

So what do I do about keywords and meta tags for pages that are automatically generated by users?

Thanks again

[rogerd]

On each type of page, determine where you might find them. On a thread page, for example, you have the thread title, the forum title, and perhaps other variables to work with.

[thecleaner]

I still don't understand. Ok, say I was going to tell my webmaster exactly what to do with these posts so that they meta tags and keywords would be implemented for each automatically generated post. In his language, what would I need to tell him?

[thecleaner]

p.s. lately it seems the only thing getting spidered is the categories which I have in a table on the left because my adsence ads are displaying content from the categories and not the articles being posted. I have my URLS search engine friendly and my title of each post in the browser window. What am I missing?

[longen]

So what do I do about keywords and meta tags for pages that are automatically generated by users?

Depending on the nature of the site/users you could allow users to describe their content by adding a few tags - you could then use the tags as Keywords.
Fot the META Desc the opening sentence of the users content should be generally useful and unique.

The other option might be to avoid generating any META tags at all but the experts on the list caution againt using formats such as:
<meta name="keywords" content="">
<meta name="description" content="">
due to the risk of duplicate data. They either have to be used as intended or not generated at all.

[Kurgano]

Meta tags, don't use one set of description or title tags that will repeat on every page.

Instead use the forum code to pull unique descriptions into your meta tags.

Forums already create links out of the titles members use for their posts, just pull that same code into a meta tag.

Example, with phpBB, In the overall_header.tpl file you can add <meta name="description" content="{PAGE_TITLE}" />

the {pagetitle} parameter will pull that posts title into the description tag which isn't perfect but is better than a repeating one.

You can then play with your code a bit and get even better results. content="{page_title} in {forum_name}" etc.

Try it all out, theres no better way to learn.