Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We have setup a new phpBB2 forum and are ready to go live; but what do we have to consider regarding SE's and specific Google. I do not want to get in a situation where we get penilized just because we have a forum. Do we have to exclude pages via the robot.txt? The forum URL's also does not look very SE friendly; do we need to do something about that?
Any other advices will be appreciated!
And without heavy modding, this cannot be avoided...
Ofcourse you have to disable session id's, or else you board will not get indexed at all...
You could add a google sitemap generator..
I recently added this to my robots.txt:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /forum/search.php?*
Disallow: /forum/groupcp.php?*
Disallow: /forum/privmsg.php?*
Disallow: /forum/posting.php?*
Disallow: /forum/modcp.php?*
Disallow: /forum/login.php?*
I keep experimenting with phpBB, to make it right, adding my own spamfilters, and "SEO" hacks...
I have a few, sticky me if you want to see....
I remove session ids. I add a google sitemap mod that automatically creates a sitemap for the forum. I add a mod that also creates a regular sitemap for the main pages of the forums, and another for the actual forum messages.
I also have some of my own modifcations that set up title, description and keyword tags thoroughout the forums.
I would recommend not using any kind of url rewrite mod for phpbb. It is unnecessary to get your messages indexed, and actually creates more duplicate urls.
I think those are the basics I do.. I do a few other things as primers, but has more to do with the way I use things than any kind of general set up.
Personally, I started with the ABLE2KNow SEO mod, but eventually just morphed it into my own set of modifcations. Like I said though, if you use it, I would not do the url rewrite part of it.
